Page 40 - Azerbaijan State University of Economics

THE JOURNAL OF ECONOMIC SCIENCES: THEORY AND PRACTICE, V.81, # 2, 2024, pp. 30-59

Synopsis of the Women Empowerment Indicator
To construct the women empowerment indicator, the multiple correspondence
analysis (MCA) method was used. Given the multifaceted nature of women
empowerment, it was constructed using nine modalities which included; whether
mother received higher education, received professional/technical training, is a
shareholder, receives assistance from family members, has post of responsibility in a
professional association, receives assistance from a solidarity association, receives
assistance from friends and associates, receives assistance from religious group and
has a savings account resulting in nine dimensions which were reduced to one by the
MCA method as seen on Table 1 in the appendix

The various scores were generated and normalized to treat for the presence of negative
values which may cloud the grouping of attribute and interpretation of results. It is
observed that all the variables contributed to the first dimension except receives
assistance from friends and associates. Higher education contributes about 18% to the
total inertia, professional training about 15% to the total inertia while having a post of
responsibility in a professional association, receives assistance from family, receives
assistance from friends and associates, assistance from religious association, receives
assistance from solidarity association, having a savings account and being a
shareholder contributed 13.13%, 10.84%, 10.46%, 9.47%, 8.74%, 8.22% and 6.50%
respectively. The results reveal that most of the dimensions significantly contributed
to the total inertia given their values are closely related. However, the indicator was
predicted from the first dimension (mother received higher education) as it has the
highest contribution to total inertia. This may be due to the incident that formal
education commonly aims at providing learners with skills, abilities and knowledge
that make individuals capable of participating in the market and society as a whole.

Summary Descriptive Statistics
The statistics Table 2 provides the average values of all the variables used in the
analysis of the relationship between women empowerment and agricultural
production as well as their deviation from the mean. The household consumption
survey descriptive statistics reveal that the mean of the log of agricultural production
(the value of crops exploited on agricultural land) is 5.85 with a standard deviation of
1.64 indicating a small deviation of the observations from the mean. The average
agricultural production by women is 5.74 with a standard deviation of 1.58 while that
of the men sub sample is 5.88 with standard deviation of 1.66. It is thus observed that
women’s production is just slightly lower than that of men .This goes a long way to
endorse Food and Agricultural Organization’s (FAO’s) estimates which show that
women represent a substantial share of the total agricultural labour force, as individual
food producers or as agricultural workers.

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