Gender Inequality, Social Capital, and Economic Growth in Turkey

Although sociologists have already recognised the gender aspect of social capital, to date it
has not yet been systematically investigated in an endogenous growth model. In pursuing this
objective theoretically, we draw on Agénor and Canuto (2015) that has offered a three-period
(childhood, adulthood, and old age) gender-based Overlapping Generations (OLG)
framework, but we explore a different mechanism through which social capital may explain
gender equality and prospects for economic growth in Turkey. This paper contributes in
several ways to understanding the pivotal role of social capital in the process of economic
development. First, social capital gives individuals a great sense of community and feelings of
pleasure, and therefore we consider social capital as a possible driving factor of labour
productivity. Second, in our model setting, survival rate for adults is determined by the average
social capital level of men and women because individuals who are less socially integrated
are more likely to have high mortality rates than people with strong ties to their community.
Third, we elucidate an important, but understudied, trade-off between time allocated by women
to market work and social capital-enhancing activities, and show that these two components
of time allocation have opposite effects on intra-household bargaining power.