Preschool availability and female labor force participation : evidence from Indonesia

Female labor force participation (FLFP) in Indonesia lags behind other countries in the region and has remained more or less unchanged since 1990. Descriptive evidence by the same authors points to unmet childcare needs as one constraint on FLFP. In this paper, we provide the first estimates of the impact of childcare availability on FLFP in Indonesia. Our findings suggest that access to public preschools leads to higher employment of mothers of age-eligible children, but access to private preschool does not. Specifically, an additional public preschool per 1,000 children raises employment of mothers of age-eligible children by 6.9 percentage points. This represents a 13.3 percent improvement from the average work participation at 52 percent.