Do Free Trade Agreements Strengthen or Erode Women's Civil Liberties?

Alberto Chong
Additional contact information
Alberto Chong: Department of Economics, Georgia State University and Department of Economics, Universidad del Pacifico

International Center for Public Policy Working Paper Series, at AYSPS, GSU from International Center for Public Policy, Andrew Young School of Policy Studies, Georgia State University

Abstract: Does deeper trade integration advance or undermine women's civil liberties, their freedom of movement, property rights, freedom from forced labor, and access to justice? Trade can raise women's civil standing by expanding female employment and bargaining power, by importing legal commitments through labor and dispute-settlement chapters, and through rule-of-law spillovers. However, it can erode that standing through coercive export-sector labor practices, competitive deregulation, and the displacement of women from protected sectors. We estimate the effect of entering a free trade agreement with the United States on women's civil liberties for all the countries with bilateral agreements drawing on an annual panel of 182 countries observed from 1970 to 2025. When applying a staggered difference-in-differences estimator with common support we find a decline of roughly five percent of a cross-country standard deviation, which is robust to a broad battery of empirical tests. Our results caution against the optimistic view that trade agreements diffuse women's rights.

Pages: 9 pages
Date: 2026-08
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://ayspsrd.gsu.edu/ays/ispwps/paper2626.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ays:ispwps:paper2626

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in International Center for Public Policy Working Paper Series, at AYSPS, GSU from International Center for Public Policy, Andrew Young School of Policy Studies, Georgia State University Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Paul Benson ().