Foreign direct investment and gender inequality: evidence from South Africa

Victor Stolzenburg, Marianne Matthee, Caro Janse van Rensburg and Carli Bezuidenhout

UNCTAD Transnational Corporations Journal

Abstract: We study an often-overlooked factor behind gender inequality: globalization, in particular, foreign direct investment (FDI). Building on a growing literature that studies the impact of trade and FDI on gender inequality, we test whether foreign-owned firms exhibit a different gender wage gap (GWG) than firms with domestic ownership, using unique South African administrative matched employer-employee data. We find that the unconditional GWG is substantially smaller in foreign-owned firms than in firms with domestic ownership. We also find that for foreign-owned firms this difference is reversed once we control for a large set of fixed effects. In our preferred specification, foreign-owned firms have a larger GWG of about 2.4 percentage points. The share of women employed in foreign firms is lower than in firms with domestic ownership, in contrast to similar studies, which may indicate an underlying inequality in opportunities for women within a developing country context.

Date: 2020-12-18
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://unctad.org/system/files/official-document/diaeia2020d3a5_en.pdf?repec (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:unc:tncjou:55

Access Statistics for this article

UNCTAD Transnational Corporations Journal is currently edited by Kumi Endo

More articles in UNCTAD Transnational Corporations Journal from United Nations Conference on Trade and Development Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Kumi Endo ().