Impact of gender on access to finance in developing countries

ABSTRACT

This paper studies the effect of female ownership on access to finance on a broad panel of developing countries. We find that female owners generally face more credit constraints compared to their male counterparts, however, such constraints are lower for women-owned firms that have an experienced senior management. We further show that with better institutional and policy environment in a country, women-owned firms face fewer credit constraints. Our findings remain robust when tested across a sample of small and medium enterprises (hereinafter SMEs) and other sensitivity tests.

JEL CLASSIFICATION:

• A13
• G21
• J16
• O16

KEYWORDS:

• Gender
• access to finance
• managerial experience
• developing countries

Acknowledgments

The authors are grateful to Professor Mustafa F. Özbilgin of Brunel University, UK, and seminar participants at 2nd International Interdisciplinary Conference on Gender, Work and Society: Bringing together feminist and postcolonial insights, 2019 and Dr. Yasir Riaz for their invaluable and constructive comments. Any errors or omissions are the sole responsibility of the authors.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).