Institutional Pathways to Women’s Economic Empowerment: Micro-Level Evidence from India’s Rural Livelihood Economy

Abstract

Women’s economic empowerment is widely recognized as central to inclusive development, yet empirical evidence linking institutional support systems to measurable agency remains limited at the micro level. This study examines how institutional participation shapes women’s economic empowerment within a structured rural livelihood economy. Using primary survey data from 418 women engaged in sericulture activities, the analysis constructs a multidimensional empowerment index and estimates a multiple regression model to evaluate the effects of training access, credit inclusion, collective participation, resource accessibility, and decision autonomy. The results demonstrate that all institutional predictors are positively and significantly associated with empowerment outcomes, with decision autonomy and training access emerging as the strongest drivers. The findings indicate that empowerment is not an automatic consequence of employment but an institutional achievement mediated through capability-building and agency reinforcement. By providing regression-based evidence from a women-intensive agro-industrial sector, the study advances empowerment theory and demonstrates that livelihood programs function as scalable infrastructures of gender transformation when embedded within integrated institutional ecosystems. The framework offers transferable insights for rural development policy beyond the empirical setting and supports a systemic approach to empowerment design.