Female Employment and Access to Child Care Services in Croatia: Is There a Connection?

The goal of this article is to establish existence, strength and direction of association between female employment rate and child care coverage in Croatia at county level in the 1998-2009 period. We have established existence of substantive and stable regional differences in both child care coverage and female employment rate. A strong correlation between these two indicators exists, but the association between their yearly changes is far weaker. Various specifi cations of regression models upon this panel indicated strong intervening role of yearly change in county-level GDP in explaining employment rate, while lagging the trend in child care coverage for one year did not change the results. Association is more robust when changes in child care coverage are being predicted by changes in female employment level in the previous year.

Format: pdf-file