DIGITAL ECONOMY AND WOMEN EMPOWERMENT: A MEDIATION ANALYSIS OF ECONOMIC OUTCOMES IN EMERGING MARKETS

The fast pace of the digital economy is increasing women empowerment by mediating. Within the framework of emerging markets, the online markets, digital platforms, and financial technologies have allowed women to break the structural obstacles pertaining to mobility, capital accessibility, and market awareness. The study used quantitative research methodology applied with an associative research design. The primary data was gathered using a structured questionnaire which was given to the respondents who were women entrepreneurs and income generating actors involved in digital economic activities. There were 240 valid responses about which the relationships between the indicators of the digital economy, the female empowerment dimension, and the economic outcome were studied through Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM). The results show that the digital economy is a significant and statistically reliable positive influence on women empowerment (β = 0.653, p = 0.001), which explains that the availability of digital tools, the internet market, and financial technologies allows increasing the access of women to resources, economic control, and power of choices. The improvement of gender empowerment of women in its turn plays a significant role in enhancing economic welfare (β= 0.621, p < 0.001). Despite the fact that the direct impact of digital economy on economic welfare (β = 0.287 p = 0.01) exists, it is relatively smaller, which indicates that the empowerment is one of the primary transmission mechanisms. The mediation analysis verifies that the relationships between the digital economy and the economic welfare are partially mediated by women empowerment with a high significant indirect impact (β = 0.405, p < 0.001). The structural model has a good explanatory ability, which explains 43 % of the variation in the empowerment of women and 69 % of economic welfare. On the whole, the findings also reveal that the economic gains of digital engagement are the most efficient when the digital active participation leads to the active empowerment, and the issues of digital access, lack of skills, and socio-cultural limitations do keep the potential of full empowerment down.