Trade liberalization has also been linked to reduced incidence of poverty and inequality.<sup>14</sup> In the case of India, this link has been spatially evaluated by Topalova (2007, 2010). A district with higher exposure to tariff liberalization experienced lower reductions in rural poverty, while urban poverty is unaffected by these reforms. Her work suggests that rural and urban inequality were also unaffected by liberalization.<sup>15</sup> Although a number of studies find small effects of trade reforms on wage inequality,<sup>16</sup> they have been associated with reduced incidence of child labor in India and Indonesia,<sup>17</sup> improvements in schooling and investments in human capital formation,<sup>18</sup> and decline in urban unemployment in Indian states with flexible labor markets.<sup>19</sup> Cross-country studies are mostly inconclusive on the impact of trade and globalization in promoting gender equality. For instance, the empirical relationship between trade flows and female labor force participation is often found to be contingent on the country’s income level and economic structure and the time period considered (e.g., Wood, 1991; Bussman, 2009; Cooray, Gaddis and Wacker, 2012). One of the shortcomings of cross-country studies is the lack of comparability of data across a range of countries. Studies using micro data at the level of households, employees and establishments offer a much broader scope for a detailed and meaningful analysis. Country-specific literature on the issue has documented a positive association between export-orientation and feminization of workforce.<sup>20</sup> Some studies go further to establish that the causality runs from liberalization to better outcomes for female employment, that is, trade liberalization is found to positively contribute to a convergence of male and female labor force participation and employment rates.<sup>21</sup> By comparison, using a panel of Indian formal manufacturing firms from 1998-2008, Banerjee and Veermani (2015) argue that, in spite of massive trade liberalization, India has witnessed a declining trend in female workforce participation rates since the late 1990s. Their results suggest that female employment intensity (FEI), defined as the share of all employees who are female, reduced as a result of trade liberalization. Reforms seem to have induced a skill-biased technological change, which promoted firms to hire more male workers at the expense of female

> 14 See Goldberg and Pavcnik (2007) for a survey on developing countries.

> 15 For related studies, see Porto (2004) on Argentina; McCaig (2011) on Vietnam; Goldberg and Pavcnik (2005) on Colombia.

> 16 Most studies in the field focus primarily on Latin America (e.g., Cragg and Epelbaum, 1996; Revenga, 1996; Hanson and Harrison, 1999), while there are some studies on, for example, Morocco (Currie and Harrison, 1997) and Brazil (Castilho, Menéndez and Sztulman, 2012; Kovak, 2013).

> 17 See, for example, Edmonds, Pavcnik and Topalova (2010); Kis-Katos and Sparrow (2011).

> 18 For instance, see Edmonds, Pavcnik and Topalova (2010) for India.

> 19 Hasan et al. (2012).

> 20 See, for instance, Fontana (2009); Nordas (2003) for a survey on the gender-based effects of trade liberalization in developing countries; for country-specific studies, see Ozler (2000) for Turkey; Ederington, Minier and Troske (2009) for Colombia; Aguayo-Tellez et al. (2013) for Mexico; Rahman and Islam (2013) for Bangladesh; Subramanian and Roy (2001) for Mauritius.

21 See for example, Juhn, Ujhelyi and Villegas-Sanchez (2014) for a study on Mexico; Gaddis and Pieters (2014) for work on Brazil.

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