A Strategic Approach to Gender, Trade Agreements and Trade Policy
By Mariama Williams, IGTN-Caribbean
August 2003

Social reproduction, production, and trade agreements
Nowhere at the policy level is the disjuncture between the reproductive and the productive spheres more apparent than in the area of international trade. Most often, international trade is seen as a technical, class-and-gender-neutral process for transforming national input/output into internationally accepted currencies and for augmenting national endowments for the enhancement of consumption and production. Yet, none of this can occur without the involvement of women’s and men’s labor. None of this can occur without the active involvement of the reproductive sector in producing food for domestic consumption, in producing and nurturing labor, and in caring for the environment.

Gender concerns in trade policies and trade agreements, therefore, arise out of the gender division of labor, gender differentiated access to economic and social resources, and women’s socially prescribed responsibility for child-care, food production and preparation. These cause women to have different perspectives on development and trade as they are differently impacted by policies related to economic and social development. These gender divisions underscore the need for better integration of the social reproduction and production spheres as the underlying basis for fashioning trade policy.

Some key questions that must be addressed include: (1) Do trade policy and agreements promote better access to services that are essential for social reproduction (water, electrification, sanitation)? (2) Do trade policy and agreements increase, lessen, or have no bearing on women’s access to education and health care? (3) Is trade policy complemented by social and other policies that promote human development?

In this case, policy interventions and strategies should begin with a situational analysis of men’s and women’s time in providing social care and participation in the labor market and an

assessment of the nature of existing essential services and how these will be impacted by trade policies and agreements.

Micro-meso-macro linkages, gender and trade agreements and policies
The dynamics between women’s location in and identification with social reproduction, and critical gender gaps regarding access and ownership of resources are impacted by changes in trade policy and trade agreements. What does this mean for women’s and men’s daily survival and long-term strategic advancement?

Since women in most economies generally have less access than men to tangible and intangible economic and social resources-land, credit, training, etc.- gender concerns are generally wrapped with gender inequality. Inequality in the present system of allocation means that women have greater need for specific types of goods and services (Longwe, 2002). This need is not counterbalanced by women’s contribution to economic activity in their multiple roles as care givers in the household and community and workers, knowledge providers, and entrepreneurs in the formal and informal sectors of the market economy.

Thus, when we look at trade agreements from the perspective of gender issues, we must necessarily focus on critical and pervasive gender gaps (Longewe, 2002) and how these undergird the system of trade and development. Longewe identifies these gaps as ‘the observable and often measurable gap between men and women on some important socio economic indicators: ownership of property, access to land, and enrollment in school’. Changes in agreements and, hence, trade policy may alter the absolute or relative nature of the gaps between men and women to the greater disadvantage of women.

From this vantage point, a number of core questions about gender and trade must be examined. Answers to these questions will differ for every economy across different points in time but they do provide some initial guidelines towards strategic gender equality- oriented strategies.

Some key questions to be considered include:

(1) Where are women and men located at the point of introduction of trade liberalization or change in trade policies? What mechanisms and measures are incorporated into the policy changes to account for these differences?
(2) What were the expected results of the changes in trade policy? Were these results generated?
(3) What mechanisms and measures are needed to promote a gender equality- sensitive trajectory?

In this case, policy interventions and strategies should focus on:

• Identifying gender based constraints and considerations in specific areas such as land, credit, and technical assistance.
• Identifying the specific directional shifts in trade policy and how trade liberalization is occurring.
• Assessing the possible impacts of trade liberalization/export promotion on women and on gender equality. These may include new or the exacerbation of traditional factors that impede women’s access to productive resources.
• Identifying the nature of change in a competitive environment. For example, the casualization of work, more EPZs, and new sources of employment.
• Identifying the trends in terms of power and access to resources between men and women, employment, and the range of alternatives available to members of the households in response to trade liberalization.
• Identifying and monitoring changes in intra household power and income and distribution.

Trade liberalization is an inherently political process that generates winners and losers internationally and nationally and, thus, poses particular dilemmas for women and men, even inspite of the existing gender relations.

Trade liberalization is a key facilitator of the globalization process. Thus, the multilateral trading system is geared towards trade liberalization which promotes decreasing tariff and non-tariff barriers, the elimination of behind the border measures, competition policy, intellectual monopoly privileges in the form of intellectual property rights ( IPR), and the harmonization of product standards and investment liberalization.

In conventional economic analyses, trade liberalization has at least five important effects on a country. It impacts: 1) consumption, 2) production, 3) fiscal revenue, 4) employment, and 5) the balance of payments. However, from a gender sensitive perspective, there are at least two other effects that must be explicitly considered when analyzing trade liberalization: poverty/equity and environmental/ecological effects. These seven clearly identifiable effects of trade liberalization have particular implications for the process of economic development in developing countries as well as for gender relations.

Changes in consumption obviously impact social reproduction in terms of its effect on the cost and availability of household items and the nature and scope of family and individual budgets. Depending on the effect on the commodities that are critical to the daily food and survival needs of individuals and families in a country, this can mean more or less work for women in terms of securing the family’s welfare. The reality is that the former is more likely than the latter. Changes in production, whether it improves the access of local business to national or international markets, will clearly impact the number, size, and profitability of local female-and-male-owned enterprises. Ultimately, whether female or male entrepreneurs can compete will depend on the rules, access to capital, credit, training, marketing, and distribution.

Employment effects can mean increased jobs for women and men or imbalances in the distribution of jobs between the two sexes depending on which gender dominates the sector that is more favored by changes in trade rules. Fiscal revenue impacts the government’s ability to provide services to individuals, families, and communities. The balance of payments effect, which will be due to trade deficits, will tend to exacerbate consumption, production, and fiscal effects.

Overall, with trade liberalization, different sectors in the economy may gain or loose access to jobs, markets, and livelihoods. Thus, trade liberalization, as reflected in the lived experiences of children, women, and men, can create new opportunities for business, growth, employment, and income. However, it can also be linked to rising poverty (in new and traditional forms), rising inequality, joblessness, gender discrimination, gender violence, and greater informalization of the economy. The depth of the severity of the experiences of women and men varies for different sectors of the population depending on existing realities of class, ethnicity, and gender.

Trade agreements and trade policies are inherently political, social and economic processes grounded in gender and other power based asymmetries

Trade agreements are the set of modalities, rules, and procedures governing the setting of tariff, non-tariff barriers, and the bounds of reciprocity and non-reciprocity between and among countries with regard to the flow of goods and services across national borders. They also include concerns for a level of flexibility for contingent trade measures such as anti-dumping duties, countervailing and safeguard measures, as well as dispute settlement rules and procedures.

Traditionally, trade agreements provided some of the key elements for national trade policy design, development and implementation. They also tended to focus on border and cross border measures affecting the international trade of goods and services and, thus, were

restrained within the foreign economic policy scope and apparatus of the national authority. However, under the increasingly expanding nature of WTO and subsequent trade negotiations, multilateral trade rules are expanding into more and more domestic policy areas.

Trade policy refers to the rules and procedures for controlling the inflow and outflow of goods, services, and capital into and out of a country. Its scope may also include measures directed at the promotion of exports. Thus trade policy, broadly constituted, consists of sets of instruments-tariffs and non-tariff barriers, and export promotion measures, all focused on capturing, to whatever extent possible, the best possible gains from trade for a nation; thereby providing an impetus for increasing national income and employment.

Traditional trade policy objectives and priorities were conditioned by and subordinate to the imperative of national economic development and social objectives and strategies. Today, however, national trade policy, at least in the context of developing countries, is operating under the increasingly binding constraints of multilateral trade rules. It is also dominating and superceding all other objectives and policy areas. Thus trade policy measures and instruments are unidirectional (biased towards trade liberalization) and unresponsive to national/domestic objectives.

Trade agreements and trade policies impact all spheres of human activity, human development, economic growth, and gender relations. Yet, trade agreements at the bilateral, regional, and multilateral levels are completely gender blind. Trade agreements certainly do not incorporate policy goals related to gender equality. Trade and official economic decision-makers often argue that their policies are gender neutral because these policies make reference to so-called gender-neutral terms such as ‘people, farmers, and target group beneficiaries’. However, these are ‘easy formulae for gender blind treatment’ which obscure gender biases and gender inequality in the economy and overlook or ignore gender-differentiated impacts, which are often disproportionately negative for women. Ultimately, they are inimical to sustainable poverty eradicating economic development.

Clearly, there are gender concerns at the trade negotiation table, there always have been and there always will be. The problem is that the perspective and formulation of trade policy has been from the point of view of one gender-the male- with the perspectives and concerns of the female gender subordinate to, ignored or left out of the policy making process. Yet women are active contributors in key spheres of the economy that are affected by trade agreements and trade policies.

Likewise, underlying trade agreements are the different power relations between various groups of developing and developed countries. Thus, trade agreements reinforce and build on power asymmetries that imposed the wills, concerns, and priorities of economic actors in powerful countries on less powerful economic actors in poor countries. This process is being strengthened by the following four characteristics of trade agreements at the multilateral level:

(1) The practice of appending the term ‘trade related’ to those areas of economic activities that international capital would like to regulate favorably for themselves and in the interest of the developed countries while appending the term ‘trade barriers’ to those rules and regulations that are believed to be unfavorable to international capital and to the competitive advantage of developed countries. Examples of the former include the Trade-Related Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPs), Trade-related Investment Measures (TRIMs), and the focus on creating a multilateral agreement on investment in the WTO. Examples of the latter usually include most social and environmental regulations-these are precisely the areas that are often most critical to women’s social and economic needs and activities.
(2) The concept of ‘single undertaking’. In these two words, the differences and diversity of experiences and stages of development of countries are erased since all countries must implement all agreements without regard to their capacity and growth stage. Thus, the history of developed countries that became ‘developed’ by virtue of being able to differentiate themselves and to selectively apply the appropriate standards and instruments conducive to their level of experience and development is being precluded as suitable models for developing countries to follow. Developing countries find themselves applying standards that have evolved over the history of a developed country such as the U.S. and the UK without regard to where they are in terms of the level of education of the population and labor force, the very factors that are critical for social reproduction and production.
(3) The increasing process of formalized ‘coherence ’between the international financial institutions that provide development financing and ensure liquidity in the trade and monetary system and the World Trade Organization. Increasingly, the interaction between the IMF, the World Bank, and the WTO is geared towards ‘harmonious implementation of common and complimentary objectives’ (IBRD, 1998)-mainstreaming trade into development. In the case of the World Bank, its PRSP and CAS function as mechanisms and processes that lock in privatization of essential services and the elimination of behind the border measures. Ultimately, this ‘coherence’ presents dangers of cross conditionalities.
(4) Trade liberalization is intertwined with social, labor market and fiscal policies, etc., and thus has tremendous implications for development, poverty eradication, and gender equality.

Summary
Gender biases in social and employment relations and gender inequalities in ownership, control, and access to economic resources such as land, credit, and technical assistance play an important role in the multilateral trade system to the detriment of women. Interestingly, however, the existence of these biases and constraints do not seem to play a significant role in the formulation of trade negotiation positions and trade policies. At the same time, trade expansion and trade intensification, as promoted by the structural adjustment and other programs of the World Bank and the IMF, and the trade liberalisation agenda of the World Trade Organization, rely explicitly on the incorporation of women’ s labour both in the formal and informal sectors of the economy. In addition, the cost of adjusting to the consequence of trade liberalisation (such as cuts in public services due to budget shortfall from the reduction of trade tariffs) are disproportionately borne by women. Overall, liberalisation and the economic adjustment which accompanies it often leads to the intensification of women’s care activities.

Thus, from a gender perspective, what is important is that trade policies, programs, and mechanisms promote sustainable human development and enhance social policies which protect the poor and promote the economic and social advancement of women and men. Furthermore, they should take into account differences in country needs, nature and scope of business size, activities, constraints and ability to compete, and recognise and develop mechanisms and processes that seek to overcome the special constraints that women face inthe economy due to gender biases and gender inequality.

There is a need for an integrated framework for sustainable, gender sensitive humandevelopment. Trade policy must be examined in the context of all other macro-level policies. In this context, trade policy should be one of many instruments (along with industrial, fiscal and monetary policies, etc.) aimed at promoting gender equality, sustainable economic development, poverty eradication, and the improvement in the standard of living of all citizens.

Finally, trade rules should be constrained and bound by existing international agreements that promote human rights and women’s rights, ecological sustainability, and human dignity and life. Moreover, there should be fairness, transparency, democracy, and participation by civil society in the WTO system.

References:
Caliari, Aldo. 2002A. Coherence between trade and finance policies: Summary of current issues and possible research and advocacy agenda. Center of Concern, Washington, D.C.
IBRD.1998 ‘Report of the Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund, President of the World Bank and Director General of the World Trade Organization on Coherence.’ World Bank, Washington, D.C.
Longwe, Sara Hlupekile. 2002. ‘Assessment of the Gender Orientation of NEPAD.’ Longwe & Associates, Zambia.
Williams, Mariama.2003. Gender Mainstreaming in the Multilateral Trading System Commonwealth Secretariat, London.