Do climate change and world uncertainty exacerbate gender inequality? Global evidence.

The attention surrounding the climate change has gained momentum over the last two decades, with significant stress on its consequential impact on gender inequality. Simultaneously, economies are caught in an environment of heightened uncertainty, potentially exerting influence on gender disparities. Within this framework, this study attempts to empirically investigate the implications of climate change and world uncertainty for gender inequality by using a balanced panel of 100 economies between 1995 and 2021. The novelty of this study lies in its adoption of Gender Inequality Index, a comprehensive measure quantifying gender disparity using three dimensions including reproductive health, economic empowerment, and labour market. Moreover, this study has adopted two different measures: the total ecological footprint to measure environmental pressures and ND-GAIN’s Vulnerability index to capture the climate change vulnerability, thereby ensuring comprehensive proxies for climate change dynamics. The estimated models also control for the effects of globalisation, economic growth, and education expenditure. The panel cointegration tests establish a significant long-run relationship between the variables of the study. Furthermore, the long-run results of PMG-ARDL estimation technique indicate that both climate change and world uncertainty contribute to increasing the gender disparities. Additionally, the results reveal that globalisation, economic growth, and education expenditure play crucial roles in diminishing gender disparities. The reliability of these findings is further confirmed by the PCSEs and DKSE estimation techniques. Moreover, the baseline findings obtained using total ecological footprint as a measure of climate change are consistent when climate change is proxied by Vulnerability Index. Potential policy suggestions for mitigating the detrimental gender ramifications stemming from climate change and rising world uncertainties are also discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]