# **1. Introduction**

Trade liberalization is seen as a panacea for economic growth and development especially for developing countries. Trade is expected to generate higher levels of growth and productivity by expanding employment opportunities and sustain livelihoods for all and thereby enabling these countries to find their way out of poverty. Over the past two decades, numerous bilateral, regional trade agreements and multilateral trade agreements have been floated across the world. The impacts of opening of trade opportunities by these agreements vary for different groups - across the developed and developing world, the skilled and unskilled, the urban and the rural and so on.

Most importantly, the implications of these trade agreements on the economic and social prospects of women and men differ especially for those in developing and least developed countries, as the factors of production are reallocated among sectors that employ men and women in different intensities. Global trade liberalization and regional integration have gender-specific outcomes in developing countries where women do not have the same access to the benefits of trade as men.

Though there has been a growing literature on the impact of trade liberalization and regional integration on women in developing countries, these studies have come out with conflicting conclusions. Some studies highlight that greater trade openness and integration has often been accompanied by growing economic opportunities for women mainly in manufacturing and services sectors especially in export-oriented sectors in many developing countries. Sectors such as garments and light manufacturing, have employed large numbers of women in recent decades. These developments have translated into stronger market incentives for women’s labor force participation in the form of rising demand for female labor and, in some cases, higher absolute and relative wages.<sup>2</sup> On the other hand, there have been studies that have shown that women tend to be negatively impacted by trade openness and integration compared to men. Trade leads to changes in the structure of production as some sectors may expand because of new export opportunities, while others may contract because of import substitution. These studies argue that since in developing countries, women are usually clustered in some specific productive sectors and have limited skills and mobility, they are often found to be engaged in the contracting sectors, leading to further jobs losses for them. Moreover, it has been found that even if women work in sectors that expand, the quality of the jobs created and the perspectives for skill development often remain limited for them because of horizontal and vertical gender segregation.<sup>3</sup> Another related issue is that while increase in employment opportunities for women is important, however, this does not necessarily translate to reduced gender inequalities such as gender segregation in types of occupations and activities, gender gaps in terms of wages and working conditions, and gender-specific constraints in access to productive resources,

> 2 World Development Report (2012).

> 3 Zarrilli, Simonetta (2017).

2