Does the Liberalization of Trade Advance Gender Equality in Schooling and Health?

Working Papers from Economic Growth Center, Yale University

Abstract: This paper assesses the empirical relationship between the liberalization of international trade and the economic status of women. Although historically globalization is not generally linked to the advancement of women, several recent country studies find export led growth in middle and low income countries is associated with improvements in women’s employment opportunities. Does intercountry empirical evidence confirm this association across a wider range of countries, and suggest the mechanisms by which it operates? Measures of wages for men and women are an unreliable basis for study of gender inequality in many low-income countries, and thus schooling and health are analyzed here as indicators of productivity and welfare and gender gaps. For a sample of 70 countries observed at five year intervals from 1965 to 1980, tariff, quota, and foreign exchange restrictions are found to be inversely associated with trade, and with the levels of education and health, especially for women. Natural resource exports, although providing foreign exchange for imports, appear to reduce investments in schooling and health, and delay the equalization of these human capital investments between men and women. Liberalization of trade policy is consequently linked in the cross section to increased trade, to greater accumulation of human capital, and to increased gender equality.

Keywords: Trade Liberalization; Schooling; Health; Gender Equality (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: F02 I12 I21 J16 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 44 pages
Date: 2006-05
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dev, nep-edu, nep-hea, nep-hrm, nep-int and nep-ltv
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (11)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.econ.yale.edu/growth_pdf/cdp935.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Does the Liberalization of Trade Advance Gender Equality in Schooling and Health? (2006)
Working Paper: Does the Liberalization of Trade Advance Gender Equality in Schooling and Health? (2006)
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:egc:wpaper:935

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Economic Growth Center, Yale University Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Benjamin King ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).