Association Between Women’s Labor Force Participation Rate and GDP per Capita in the Philippines: A Regression Analysis

The women's labor force participation rate is significantly growing over the years. These growing numbers have drawn attention to the relationship between women's labor force participation and economic development in the Philippines. Specifically, this study aimed to identify whether the women's labor force participation rate has a significant or insignificant effect on GDP per capita. Using secondary data of women labor force participation rate and GDP per capita of the Philippines from 2000 to 2024 from Our World in Data and World Data, the annual time series data were analyzed using simple linear regression together with different diagnostics tests. To test the result, different methods were used: Linear Regression Analysis, Ramsey Equation Specification Error Test (RESET Test), Durbin-Watson Test, Breusch-Pagan Test, and Normality Test. The result shows that the model has a p=value of 0.5265, which is significantly higher than the 0.05 level of significance. This result indicates that there is no statistically significant relationship between the women's labor force participation rate and GDP per capita in the Philippines. Moreover, with a Multiple R-Squared of 0.01766, it means that only 1.77% of GDP per capita can be explained by the model. This study also tries to transform the independent variable using Logarithmic Transformation and Box-Cox Transformation, but the statistical significance between the variables is still insignificant. To sum up, the results indicate that only the women labor force alone explains very little variation in GDP per capita in the Philippines, and it is also crucial to explore other factors such as education, employment, enabling environment and health that might affect the growth in GDP per capita.