Is trade liberalization a window of opportunity for women?

Hildegunn Nordås

No ERSD-2003-03, WTO Staff Working Papers from World Trade Organization (WTO), Economic Research and Statistics Division

Abstract: This paper analyses how trade affects women's job opportunities and earnings through five case studies: Mauritius, Mexico, Peru, the Philippines and Sri Lanka. It is found that women's share of the labour force has increased over time and the wage gap between men and women has narrowed. It is also found that there is a positive and statistically significant relation between exports and women's share of employment while there is a statistically significant and negative correlation between women's share in employment and imports. The correlation between women's share of employment and trade stems from variation between sectors rather than within sectors over time, indicating that export-competing industries tend to employ women while import-competing industries tend to employ men. Trade liberalization is likely to create jobs for women and over time increase their relative wages.

Keywords: Gender; trade liberalization (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: F14 F16 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2004
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/90684/2/772253862.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:zbw:wtowps:ersd200303

DOI: 10.30875/a9503098-en

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in WTO Staff Working Papers from World Trade Organization (WTO), Economic Research and Statistics Division Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics ().