Gender, Informal Employment and Trade Liberalization in Mexico

Sarra Ben Yahmed () and Pamela Bombarda

The World Bank Economic Review, 2020, vol. 34, issue 2, 259-283

Abstract: This paper studies how import liberalization affects formal employment across gender. The theory offers a mechanism to explain how male and female formal employment shares can respond differently to trade liberalization through labor reallocation across tradable and nontradable sectors. Using Mexican data over the period 1993–2001, we find that Mexican tariff cuts increase the probability of working formally for both men and women within four-digit manufacturing industries. The formalization of jobs within tradable sectors is driven by large firms. Constructing a regional tariff measure, we find that regional exposure to import liberalization increases the probability of working formally in the manufacturing sector for both men and women, and especially for men. However in the service sectors, the probability of working formally decreases for low-skilled women.

Keywords: formal and informal labor; gender; trade liberalization; Mexico (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (28)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/wber/lhy020 (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
Working Paper: Gender, Informal Employment and Trade Liberalization in Mexico (2017)
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:oup:wbecrv:v:34:y:2020:i:2:p:259-283.

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://academic.oup.com/journals

Access Statistics for this article

The World Bank Economic Review is currently edited by Eric Edmonds and Nina Pavcnik

More articles in The World Bank Economic Review from World Bank Oxford University Press, Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP, UK. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Oxford University Press ().