Regarding the relation between GVCs and women’s empowerment, some strands of the literature studied the impact of GVCs on gender wage disparity. For instance, Deb (2021) uses the Trade in Value Added Database (TiVA) by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and conclude that neither backward nor forward linkages were able to improve the relative wages of female workers in India. Nevertheless, Jenkins (2005) confirmed that women wages and working conditions are better in GVCs. Furthermore, few papers have discussed the impact of GVCs on women’s employment in general. GVC participation has been proven to increase female employment especially for developing countries (Shepherd and Stone, 2013; Bamber and Staritz, 2016).

Yet, it is important to note that the impact of GVCs on female empowerment can be moderated through several external and internal factors. At the external level, the scope of drafting of regional and bilateral trade agreements has been largely expanded to accommodate several Sustainable Development Goals. A large set of agreements prioritized environmental matters through the inclusion of climate change and environmental protection provisions (Martínez-Zarzoso, 2018). Labor rights related provisions also gained a large interest as starting from 2016, more than 136 countries negotiated at least one free trade agreement (FTA) that encloses labor rights related provisions (ILO, 2017; Harrison, 2019). However, only few strides have been made in order to include more gender related provisions in FTAs since among all FTAs in force, only 20% of them include explicit chapters or clauses that endeavor to achieve gender equality and to empower women (Monteiro, 2021). Similarly, according to the gender and trade report (UNCTAD, 2020), only 74 out of 500 RTAs (around 15%) include provisions that prioritize gender issues. Yet, it is worth mentioning that it is not the number of provisions or length of chapters including gender considerations that matter but their enforcement. Bahri (2021) shows how some RTAs such as Canada-Chile and Canada-Israel Agreements include whole chapters that address gender issues; however, there is a lack of legal obligations that ensure their proper implementation. Conversely, other RTAs such as the Stabilization and Association Agreement between the European Communities and the Republic of Montenegro, where gender provisions are included in the chapter on development and not standalone chapters for gender issues, are more efficient due to the existence of strong legal obligations that enforce the parties to respect the clauses and to stop any discrimination based on gender. At the internal level, and given the discrimination against women on the labor market, they might face more barriers when it comes access to finance, permits to start a business, tax policy, etc. This is why it is important to see how the effect of GVCs on women’s empowerment is moderated by the obstacles they might face.

Against this background, there are no previous empirical studies, to our knowledge, that tackle the impact of GVCs on women’s entrepreneurship in developing countries and especially the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, which is characterized by both low female labor force participation and low integration into GVCs. In addition, no empirical studies have been conducted to assess the impact of gender provisions on women’s engagement in international trade in the MENA region. Indeed, compared to the other regions, the MENA region is ranked the lowest in the world for attaining gender equality based on the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Report (2021). Moreover, based on the Women Peace and Security (WPS) Index, the MENA region’s performance was very poor as it comprises 12 of the 25 worst performing countries globally (Danon and Collin, 2021). Therefore, the contribution of this paper is twofold. First, it focuses on the impact of GVCs on women’s trade participation as entrepreneurs and employees.

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