Publication: Engendering Trade
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2012
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2012
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The authors analyze the interaction between a country's world market integration and its attitude towards gender roles. They discuss both theoretically and empirically how female empowerment is a source of comparative advantage that shapes a country's response to trade opening. Reciprocally, the authors show that as countries integrate into the world economy, the costs and benefits of gender discrimination shift. Their theory goes beyond a potential aggregate wealth effect associated with trade opening, and emphasizes the heterogeneity of impacts. On the one hand, countries in which women are empowered--measured by fertility rates, female labor force participation or female schooling--experience an expansion of industries that use female labor relatively more intensively. On the other hand, the gender gap is smaller in countries that export more in relatively femalelabor intensive sectors. In an increasingly globalized economy, the road to gender equality is paradoxically very specific to each country's productive structure and exposure to world markets.
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“Do, Quy-Toan; Levchenko, Andrei; Raddatz, Claudio. 2012. Engendering Trade. © World Bank. http://hdl.handle.net/10986/9093 License: CC BY 3.0 IGO.”
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Publication Engendering trade(2011-08-01)The authors analyze the interaction between a country's world market integration and its attitude towards gender roles. They discuss both theoretically and empirically how female empowerment is a source of comparative advantage that shapes a country's response to trade opening. Reciprocally, the authors show that as countries integrate into the world economy, the costs and benefits of gender discrimination shift. Their theory goes beyond a potential aggregate wealth effect associated with trade opening, and emphasizes the heterogeneity of impacts. On the one hand, countries in which women are empowered -- measured by fertility rates, female labor force participation or female schooling -- experience an expansion of industries that use female labor relatively more intensively. On the other hand, the gender gap is smaller in countries that export more in relatively female-labor intensive sectors. In an increasingly globalized economy, the road to gender equality is paradoxically very specific to each country s productive structure and exposure to world markets.Publication Comparative Advantage, International Trade, and Fertility(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2014-06)This paper analyzes theoretically and empirically the impact of comparative advantage in international trade on fertility. It builds a model in which industries differ in the extent to which they use female relative to male labor and countries are characterized by Ricardian comparative advantage in either female labor or male labor intensive goods. The main prediction of the model is that countries with comparative advantage in female labor intensive goods are characterized by lower fertility. This is because female wages and therefore the opportunity cost of children are higher in those countries. 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