International Trade and the Gender Wage Gap: New Evidence from India's Manufacturing Sector

Nidhiya Menon and Yana Rodgers ()

World Development, 2009, vol. 37, issue 5, 965-981

Abstract: Summary This study examines how increasing competitive forces from India's trade liberalization have affected women's relative wages and employment. Neoclassical theory implies that costly discrimination against female workers should diminish over time with increased competition. We incorporate this idea into a theoretical model of competition and industry concentration and test the model using repeated cross-sections of India's National Sample Survey Organization (NSSO) household survey data merged with trade and production data from 1983 to 2004. Estimates from ordinary least-squares (OLS) and fixed effects regressions at the industry-level indicate that increasing openness to trade is associated with larger wage gaps in India's concentrated manufacturing industries.

Keywords: trade; liberalization; gender; wage; gap; India; discrimination; Asia; competition (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2009
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (72)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0305-750X(08)00319-7
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

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:eee:wdevel:v:37:y:2009:i:5:p:965-981

Access Statistics for this article

World Development is currently edited by O. T. Coomes

More articles in World Development from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().