Financial Inclusion Reforms and Female Entrepreneurship in Latin America: Evidence With Health Equity Heterogeneity

Female entrepreneurship is an important dimension of women’s economic participation in Latin America and may also function as a pathway with implications for health and wellbeing. This study estimates the causal effects of national financial inclusion reforms (2014–2018) on female entrepreneurship using staggered difference-in-differences with Callaway-Sant’Anna estimators across 15 countries. Data from the World Bank, ECLAC, and PAHO span 2014–2021. The empirical analysis does not model health outcomes directly; instead, it tests whether the entrepreneurship effects of financial inclusion reforms vary according to pre-existing gender inequity in health systems, measured through a composite index based on maternal mortality, antenatal care, contraceptive prevalence, and health insurance access. The study therefore contributes primarily to economic policy analysis while drawing on a health-related contextual framework to show how baseline health-system conditions moderate policy effectiveness in promoting female entrepreneurship.