SECTION 1: Introduction

The purpose of this paper is to inform the work of the UNRISD/UNDP project "Technical Co-operation and Women's Lives: Integrating Gender into Development Policy". It describes contemporary changes in the international economic context as they affect the evolution of employment structures, and attempts to analyse how women's labour market prospects in developing countries are being affected.¹ The paper helps to illuminate the broad parameters for the five national studies being prepared for the project and aims to provide a basis for comparison between them in terms of their relation to the evolving world economy.

One of the premises of the argument of this paper is the idea that developments in the international economy, i.e., the scale and pattern of international economic transactions and the forces driving them, are having a determining influence on the prosperity of developing economies and on income earning possibilities for their citizens. The relevance, and excitement, of these developments from a gender perspective is that the process manifestly does not preclude the participation of women as economic agents: indeed, women are centrally involved, and their involvement is crucial to a country's prospects of economic growth.

The fundamental question that forms the background to policy discussions in this area is whether this participation is equitable or exploitative of women. Are the terms on which women are involved in such activity inegalitarian, as in other spheres of economic and social life? Do the quantity and quality of female employment in trade-related activity present an avenue for the improvement of women's economic position? This paper addresses this question — without claiming to be able to answer it definitively, given the poor state of the necessary data — by reference to trade-related developments in different economic sectors and to differences in countries" experiences of trade and industrialization.²

The paper first sets out what is known about the relation between different types of industrialization and female employment in the light of evolution in regulatory arrangements for world trade, and, secondly, raises a new issue: the significance, in relation to female employment, of the rapid expansion in international transactions in services. The organization of the paper is as follows: SECTION 2 discusses matters on which information and interpretation are relatively clear cut. This mainly concerns historical experiences in developing countries concerning the relation between the growth and structure of industrial capacity and the demand for female labour, (Sections 2.2 and 2.3), with the relevance of international trade regulations between developed and developing countries explained (Section 2.4).

SECTION 3 concerns new developments in international markets as they are now affecting national production structures and women's employment prospects. It focuses on the new activities of transnational corporations and the recent rapid expansion of international transactions in services. New information technologies are at the root of many of these changes, but the relocational patterns taking shape cannot be understood without reference, again, to the rules — and lack of rules — that govern international trade in services and the underlying factor endowments of developing countries that determine their competitive position in various types of economic activity. Much of this section is speculative because the empirical evidence is sparse and unsystematic, and often lacking altogether, especially as regards the gender dimension of change. Nevertheless there is enough information for certain trends to be evident, and there are strong pointers for particular concerns regarding women's involvement.

The final concluding section (SECTION 5), identifies issues on which research needs to be done, and on which, for policy purposes, monitoring of developments is important.

The paper also discusses (in SECTION 4) the situation in the five countries selected for attempts at policy dialogue on gender issues under Phase II of the UNRISD/UNDP project: Bangladesh, Jamaica, Morocco, Uganda and Viet Nam. This selection of countries covers a range of national situations: three low income and two low-middle income countries (according to the World Bank classification); or, cut another way, three countries — not the three lowest income countries — with a poor record on human development, and two with a good record in this respect. Of the five countries, two are well established in world markets for manufactures and international services transactions (Jamaica and Morocco); while two countries are on the brink (actually or prospectively) of becoming substantial exporters (Bangladesh and Viet Nam). Uganda, by contrast, is an agriculturally based economy with no export capacity in its small industrial sector, and apparently limited prospects of attaining this, according to analyses of the causes of international competitiveness in industrial and services production: a fact which reflects the extreme marginalization of African economies from the non-commodity international economy over the past decade.

1 The paper covers only the industrial and services sector; gender issues in agriculture are not addressed, except for a brief discussion of non-traditional horticulture in Section 5.

2 A second question is also raised: what benefits do women, as individuals, gain from this employment? This depends on income and cost sharing arrangements among individuals of different age and gender, within households and at the broader social level, as set by social relations of gender. It is not clear that the benefits flowing to women from trade-related employment are distinctive in this connection, and since the topic falls outside the remit of this paper it is not pursued any further here.