Glass Barriers border (Kusakabe, et al. 2008) and long-distance traders between Lao PDR and Thailand (Walker 1999).

Yet women face particular challenges in small-scale cross-border trade. Besides the “crushing weight of family responsibilities” (UN Women, 2012), women are more likely to face capital constraints, market smaller quantities and have difficulties accessing information on market opportunities (World Bank 2012c). Women are also more likely to be illiterate, which restricts their access to, and knowledge of, trade policies and procedures (USAID 2012) and thus further limits business development. Women often have to hire brokers, which eats into their profit margins, or seek assistance from officials, who are predominantly male and not trained to work in gender-sensitive environments (World Bank 2012b). This may fuel extortion and even harassment, as shown in East Africa (World Bank 2011, UN Women 2012).

Whereas this study does not find women reporting the dramatic level of abuse highlighted in the East African context, women may face binding constraints in their activity as small-scale crossborder traders. These challenges may be “visible” and acknowledged by (at least some of) the actors in the border economy, e.g., discriminatory tariffs or gender-based violence. The barriers to small-scale cross-border trade that women face may also be “invisible,” i.e., not recognized by those actors as related to gender, or indirectly—through regulations, norms, infrastructure, etc., that adversely affect women—constraining women’s participation in cross-border trade.

The contribution of this study is thus to shed light on the obstacles, both visible and invisible (“glass barriers” to trade), that prevent women from making the most of small-scale cross-border trade for income generation and empowerment. To this end, we rely on an innovative mix of original qualitative and quantitative data to both voice the concerns of the actors in the border economy and econometrically detect constraints that they fail to perceive or would not express. Our combination of qualitative and quantitative data further allows us to infer the constraints faced by women who _selected out_ of small-scale cross-border trade. Following the metaphor of Hausmann, Klinger and Wagner (2008), we shall strive to voice the concerns of both “camels” (women actually participating in cross-border trade—or the “Sahara desert”) and “hippopotami” (who would, but cannot, engage in this activity—are absent from the “Sahara”—and thus do not appear in our data).

Our study first documents that, in contrast to other parts of the world, female traders in the Mekong sub-region seldom report abuse and gender-based violence or discrimination; yet women are underrepresented in small-scale cross-border trade despite a potential for expansion and their dominance in trade and services away from border checkpoints. We next establish that poor infrastructure is a key challenge for traders, and acts as an “invisible” source of discrimination, women being more time constrained and thus disproportionately affected. Our findings further highlight that although they do not interpret it as gender-based discrimination, women are found to suffer from a higher tax rate and a tax schedule that deters them from upgrading to more profitable cross-border trade activities. This may explain along with capital constraints the lower share of women in small-scale cross-border trade than among own-account workers and the self-employed.

The structure of this paper is as follows. In the next section, we present the study design and methodology for data collection. In Section 3, we provide an overview of the border economy in Cambodia and Lao PDR 3