A cost of women workers

There's a trade-off between gender equality and limited government. That's the message of this paper (pdf) from the CEPR:

Higher participation by women in the labor market is indeed positively associated with larger governments...We find strong evidence of a causal link between participation in the labor market and government size: a 10 percent rise in participation in the labor market leads to a 7 to 8 percent rise in government size. This effect is robust to the country sample, time period, and a set of controls.

This is because government spending is partly on childcare and education, which make it easier for women to go out to work rather than raise children. So working women vote for bigger government.
But what causes women's participation in the labour force? Here's something that's overlooked - the prices of home appliances such as dishwashers and microwaves. Falls in these make it cheaper to buy ways of saving on labour in the home, which in turn make it easier for women to go out to work. Another paper by the same authors, Tiago Cavalcanti and Jose Tavares, says:

A decrease in the relative price of appliances - the ratio of the price of appliances to the consumer price index - leads to a substantial and statistically significant increase in female labor force participation. In the United Kingdom, for instance, the decline in the relative price of home appliances accounts alone for about 10 to 15 percent of the increase in female labor force participation from 1975 to 1999.

Put these two papers together and we have the message - technical progress has contributed to bigger government.
There are very few wholly good things.

Comments

[dsquared]

Hmmm, this looks like something that is beset with spurious regression issues. I can't think of a single country in the world where either the size of the government or the rate of female workforce participation hasn't had a strong time trend.

.... and indeed, equation 27 shows this exactly. Two trended variables regressed one on the other. What the?

[chris]

But there's also cross-sectional evidence that feminist societies have bigger government:
http://stumblingandmumbling.typepad.com/stumbling_and_mumbling/2005/02/a_womans_place.html

[dearieme]

Wasn't there that story that all the jobs growth in Sweden for a decade had consisted of the Govt hiring Mrs Ericson to look after Mrs Andersen's old mum, and hiring Mrs Andersen to mind Mrs Ericson's babes?

[Hit The Bid]

Whats wrong with bigger government? Oh wait do you mean "big government"...that moniker that is so fraught with trash packed meaning as to be silly?

[Alex]

I don't know, dearieme. I suggest you provide a link to a tier-one source, not Worldnetdaily/enter-wingnut-here, or shut up. Or alternatively, explain why Ericsson, not Marconi, is the world's biggest telecom/internetworking kit manufacturer if Swedish society is such a waking nightmare.