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Increasing gender equality and enhancing women empowerment through work opportunities are the important steps in achieving sustainable development. The aim of this paper is threefold: (1) to empirically examine the relationship between women economic rights and economic growth for the global sample. (2) To explore whether the effect of women’s economic rights is different across different economies. (3) This paper uses spatial econometric techniques to examine the impact of women’s economic rights on neighbouring countries. For empirical purpose, we use the data for 171 countries over the period 1960–2016. The results show that women’s economic rights positively affect growth; however, the effect is heterogeneous across different economies. From spatial analysis, we confirm that 75% spillover effect of women economic rights is passing through neighbouring country. The results of this study are consistent and coherent with the EU policy about women’s economic empowerment where it claims that joint effort in promoting women empowerment by all actors could lead to sustainable development and growth.

In developed countries, the share of services and industrial sector has increased in the past few decades and at the same time the share of agriculture sector went down considerably. In the literature, there exists a debate about structural change in the developed countries. Neoclassical economists believe that structural change is an unimportant side effect of the economic development. On the contrary, economists associated with the World Bank and some others posit that growth is brought about by the changes in sectoral composition. The objective of this study is to empirically test the relationship between sectoral shares and economic growth by using the panel data for 20 developed countries. The results of the granger causality suggest that both services and agriculture sectors do granger cause economic growth, whereas industrial sector does not granger cause growth. Reverse causality does not hold for any of the three sectors. The results of Barro and Non-Barro regressions along with the set of control variables have suggested that services sector is negatively affecting growth, whereas both industrial and agriculture shares are positively affect economic growth.