Women’s Labor Force Participation in Agri-Food Value Chains and Subjective Wellbeing: Empirical Evidence from Ethiopia

Growth in export-oriented agri-food value chains that particularly demand female labour has expanded the employment opportunities for women in many developing countries. Such employment opportunities for women can have impacts on their own and their families’ wellbeing. Studies that investigate the implications of female labour participation in the rapidly expanding agri-food value chains focus on indicators such as income and agricultural yield gains. While such material aspects are essential components of overall wellbeing, they fail to capture important elements of individual welfare effects such as subjective-wellbeing (SWB), which includes self-reported life evaluation and experienced emotions. In this paper, we examine the implications of women’s employment in the cut-flower industry on their SWB using unique primary data from Ethiopia. By employing propensity score matching and inverse probability weighted regression adjustment, we find that women working in floriculture are more likely to report lower levels of life evaluation scores and low probability of experiencing positive emotions. Our results also suggest that floriculture workers are more likely to experience depression compared to their counterparts. Further analyses of underlying mechanisms show that differences in time allocation, income, and working conditions play significant role in explaining the observed linkages.