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3.2 Transnational Corporations
During the 1990s, there has been a renewal of academic
interest in TNCs as agents of economic globalization. The debate on the "new
international division of labour" that started in the 1970s concentrated on the
relocation of certain TNC activities to low wage sites in the developing countries; but
now the interest in TNCs is much more far-reaching. The climate in developing countries
has changed dramatically over the past decade to become much more welcoming of foreign
investment as a source of capital for investment and as a means of technology transfer in
a reasonably manageable form (Lall, 1994). The amount of foreign direct investment flowing
internationally has increased and developing countries in total have been taking an
increasing share. The main changes in the geographical pattern have been that Latin
American countries, from having been the source of capital flight in the early 1980s, have
become a major destination region for new investment; that China has emerged, in the
1990s, as by far the largest developing country destination for foreign investment, and in
fact to receiving the second largest inflow of foreign investment of any country in the
world after the United States; and that Africa seems, by contrast, to be suffering actual
disinvestment in recent years, to compound the region's other woes (Lall, 1994; Bennell,
1995).
The nature of foreign investment has also changed. Much is
now in portfolio investment, in large part made possible by privatization offers by
developing country governments of state owned enterprises; this is particularly important
in India (another major new destination) and in Latin American countries.32 But perhaps the most significant change of all has been the spread
of TNCs, via foreign investment, into new activities such as infrastructure and services.
The share of services in the total world stock of foreign investment rose from an
estimated 25 per cent in 1970 to 50-60 per cent currently. TNCs are the dominant providers
in certain service sectors in developing countries (UNCTAD, 1992:166), such as hotels,
construction, information technology (including software, hardware maintenance and related
services), accountancy, management consultancy and advertising (Bailey et al.,
1993:243-4).
Contemporary changes in TNC production organization are
distinct from the previous period of expansion in at least three ways. First, they are
more integrally dependent on new information technology. The first wave of TNC relocation
to low-wage sites was made possible by improvements in transportation, but present day
activities depend fundamentally on the improvements in telecommunications and
computer-based information processing technology which comprise what is sometimes referred
to as "telematics". The precise pattern of spread of new investment is further
related to the new technologies, in that telecommunications allow links between all time
zones: in a competitive environment, TNCs now need to have involvement in markets (mainly
financial) for every hour of the 24 hours in the day. This is another reason to explain
the growth of investment to the Asian region, which fills in the time zone gap between
Europe and North America (neither Africa or Latin America benefit from this new
imperative).
Second, TNCs are now active in supplying regional markets.
The pattern of intra-firm and arms-length market trading by TNCs now includes not only
old-style South to North exportation, and supply by TNC affiliates to local markets in
large formerly protected economies in the developing world, such as India and Brazil, but
also production for regional markets. Intra-regional trade has grown faster than total
world trade over the past decade (e.g. intra-Asian trade grew at 9.5 per cent per annum
from 1980-1992, compared to growth in world trade of 5.5 per cent per annum (Joekes and
Weston, 1994:6).33 The proportion of world trade conducted within regional groupings
now accounts for 50.4 per cent of world trade, compared to 41 per cent in 1958 (WTO,
1995). Formal regional economic arrangements have multiplied in recent years; for example
33 new arrangements were notified to the GATT in 1990-1994, compared to 11 for the whole
of the 1980s (ibid.).
Third, the ways in which TNCs organize their production
facilities among countries is changing. The current phase has been called a "complex
integration" strategy (United Nations, 1994). It comprises the full dispersal of
corporate departments across the globe, to take advantage of telecommunications
possibilities and time zone straddling, setting cost considerations specific to each
departmental operation against factor costs and availabilities in different locations,
subject only to some market proximity constraints for products where transportation costs
are particularly high or follow-up service capabilities particularly important.
The process of international specialization and
integration of production units by TNCs in this way is one of the key features of economic
globalization. As an example of how developed the process has become: the production
schedules of a machine tool plant in the Philippines, part of and serving other units in a
global TNC, are subject to more or less continuous updating by telecommunications
according to the evolving production requirements of the other units round the world
(ibid.).
This example should not obscure the fact that the
globalization process — like the underlying foreign investment and the resultant
trade flows — is by no means confined to the relocation and establishment of new
operations by Northern TNCs in developing countries. The web of international financial,
production and trading links is being spun even more densely among Northern countries than
between the North and the South. Northern-based TNCs, despite the growth in the share of
investment going to developing countries, are more likely to invest in capacity in another
Northern market. Moreover, Southern-based TNCs are emerging as a significant force,
especially enterprises from the Republic of Korea and India. Most of their investment is
to other, lower-income Asian developing countries, for some of which foreign investment
originating from another developing country accounts for over 40 per cent of total inward
investment (UNCTAD, 1992). Some of the new industrializing Asian countries have thus
successfully made the transition from export platform to exporters of capital in their own
right.
The complex integration strategy is significantly
different from earlier forms of TNC strategy in other respects too. In previous periods,
TNCs either had affiliates which were "stand-alone" operations, self-sufficient
production units supplying large and/or protected developing country markets, replicating
products of the parent organization; or they practised "simple-integration
strategies" based on "outsourcing", relocating certain production
activities for production of final or intermediate products to developing countries
(UNCTAD, 1992). The latter is the kind of production organization that was analysed in the
"New International Division of Labour" debate and fuelled the growth of labour
intensive export capacity in developing countries in the 1970s and 1980s, of which the
gender impact was discussed above in SECTION 2. The
application of complex integration strategies heralds the far wider dispersion of
production facilities and employment throughout the world. In respect of employment, it
suggests the creation of a deeper employment structure than existed under previous
strategies in new locations, because the establishment of back-office functions and whole
departments, usually classified as "services", entails the setting up of a more
balanced occupational hierarchy than in assembly operations or autonomous, light
industrial plants serving local markets. Data on the remuneration of employees in
different sectors in foreign affiliates of US-based TNCs in developing countries bear this
out: while remuneration of employees in manufacturing in developing countries is
approximately 30 per cent of home-country employees, in services the ratio is two thirds
(UNCTAD, 1992:33).
Tables 8 and 9 give some data on employment creation by
TNCs. Table 8 shows that the rate of change of employment in affiliates in different
regions by TNCs based in various Northern countries in the 1980s was highest in the
developed countries, but also that it proceeded at a high rate (close to or above 10 per
cent per annum in most cases throughout the 1980s) in developing countries as a whole.
Within the developing world, however, the experience is uneven with the African and West
Asian regions conspicuous by the decline in employment in most cases. Although data for
the growth of overall employment in industry and services in the relevant countries are
not available, it seems likely that employment growth in TNCs is faster and that the share
of TNCs in total employment is rising accordingly.
Table 9 sets the scale of TNC employment in developing
countries in perspective, giving data on the share of the economically active population
and in the paid labour force employed in TNC affiliates, in all sectors and in
manufacturing.
No up-to-date disaggregation is available of these
employment data by gender. Thus, we do not know what specific gender effects the latest
developments in TNC production are having on women's employment opportunities (although
developments in services give some clue; see Section 3.3). The classic study of women
workers in transnational corporations (ILO/UNCTC, 1985) has information only up to the
early 1980s. That study found that while TNCs in total employed only a very small
proportion of the total labour force in developing countries, and very unevenly among
regions, employment in TNCs had also been growing relatively fast. The proportions of men
and women among TNC employees was thought to have remained approximately constant overall
between 1960 and 1980, with the majority of employees being male and women accounting for
around 20 per cent of the total in all sectors. Whether this represented a higher
proportion of jobs for women than in comparable employment in the sectors and countries
concerned is not possible to judge from this study.34
Overall, the issue has to be kept in perspective. As is
the case for total TNC employment (see Table 9), employment for women is in aggregate a
minor factor in employment creation in developing countries. The phenomenon is
nevertheless significant in two ways. First, it is undeniably important in the few
countries where TNC operations are concentrated, especially where, as in Singapore and
Mauritius, for example, the country is small. Second, as noted, TNC in some respects lead
local employers in employment practices, even if by a small margin, and thus contribute to
raising the general quality of employment. They may also in some cases (as in Morocco, for
example, Joekes, 1982) have taken the initiative in recruiting female employees, and
helped to challenge local cultural resistance to women's participation in the labour force
and break down previous patterns of gender segregation in the labour market.
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3.3 The Internationalization of Services
Apart from changes in the production organization of TNCs,
the other new development in the global economy is the internationalization of services.
The scale of growth in internationally traded services has been such that it now ranks
roughly equal with trade in commodities, accounting for about 20 per cent of the total
(manufactures trade, at 60 per cent, is the most important part of world trade) (GATT,
1994).
The growth of the tertiary sector in general is one of the
best known and unassailable correlates of national income growth. In industrialized
countries, the services sector accounts for by far the biggest share of output and
employment. But the global internationalization of the services sector may be accelerating
the pace of change in middle income developing countries — especially but not only in
Asia — compared to what has historically been experienced elsewhere.
The main activities in the services sector in
industrialized countries comprise health and education provision, commerce, travel,
financial services, public sector employment, and domestic service. The predominance of
some of these activities (particularly health and education) reflects the status of the
products concerned as "superior" goods in the economic sense, on which personal
expenditure rises as a proportion of income as income increases. In other respects (e.g.
large public administrations for the delivery of social security benefits) the large size
of the service sector reflects the fact that industrialized country governments spend
approximately 50 per cent of their budgets administering income transfer programmes of one
kind or another for the population.
The supposed tendency for labour productivity to improve
more slowly in these activities than in industry is usually held to explain the
historically relatively fast growth of employment in these areas (UNCTAD, 1992), and is
the basis of the normal prediction that relative employment growth will continue in
future. But the computerization of many services functions (e.g. in banking) in
industrialized countries in the 1980s and 1990s and job losses associated with this means
that simple extrapolation from the past is not in order.
In any event, domestic services sector expansion has in
large measure accounted for the steadily increasing absorption of women into the labour
force in developed countries in recent years.35 The
services sector is also a source of employment for many women in developing countries,
although its relative importance and women's representation within services varies
significantly among regions. In 1980, the services sector was estimated to employ 69 per
cent of the total female labour force in Latin America, compared to 13 per cent in Asia
and 19 per cent in Africa and the Middle East (ILO/UNCTC, 1985:9). In terms of
representation, the health and education sectors are heavily reliant on female labour in
all countries but in other parts of the sector the situation is quite variable (see Table
10). Thus, in Latin America, where the proportion of the female labour force is
particularly high in services, the bulk of that employment is in low-paid domestic
service; whereas in the Middle East and North Africa, while the overall share in services
is about average for the developing world (given the low rate of female labour
participation), retailing and commerce, where women workers are few, account for scarcely
any part of female services employment.
Trade in services is only relevant to part of the
activities across the services sector as a whole. Traded services cover services supplied
from one country to another; services in one country supplied to the consumers of another
(for example, tourism); services provided through the presence of service-providing
entities of one party in the territory of another (for example, banking); and services
provided by nationals of one party in the territory of any other (for example,
consultancies, construction projects) (GATT Secretariat, 1994).
In terms of the type of activity, this includes some
familiar, traditional services, and some which are new, linked particularly with the
explosive growth in telecommunications and other information processing capacity, in
telematics (UNCTAD, 1992). Examples of old style activity are travel and tourism,
transportation of goods and labour services (though in the latter case, to the traditional
pattern of individual labour movement and ensuing transfers of remittance income, is added
the new phenomenon of contract labour services where a workforce is exported temporarily
in the construction of turnkey projects). These are important, large scale activities,
some of which are of great national importance to some developing countries. Tourism is
also a strong growth area,36 though subject to
enormous variation in any case as a function of both cyclical fluctuation in incomes in
the tourist-sending areas and political circumstances (for example, perceptions of
terrorism).
Nevertheless, it is the new-style traded services which
have seen the most rapid rate of growth. In part this is a reflection of new market
possibilities, and the fact that the telematics revolution allows foreign entities,
experienced in these activities in industrialized countries, to make international sales
or to set up affiliates abroad to serve distant markets. Construction, accounting,
advertising, management consultancy, data processing (of credit cards transactions, air
travel data, data entry to CD-ROM etc.) and software production are examples of the first;
banking and insurance and reinsurance are examples of the second. Table 11 reveals that
developing countries have on average much lower rates of take-up of insurance by
businesses and individuals than developed countries. It gives an indication of the
potential that TNCs in services see for the realization of new markets in upper-middle
income developing countries. Not only are these countries exhibiting the fastest sustained
rates of growth of any countries in the world, with relatively equal distribution of
personal incomes which might predispose to wide uptake of new services, but expenditure
shares in services of these kinds are proportionally low and markets are therefore ripe
for realization.
The growth in new services markets covers the supply of
financial and other services, such as insurance, to consumers and to corporations and
businesses. There has been an evolution in the functions and composition of the services
sector, comprising the rise of specialist services and the emergence as stand-alone
activities of back-office functions that were formerly embedded in manufacturing firms and
not ranked as separate economic entities. Together these tendencies constitute a general
externalization of services, of which an important part involves new international
transactions. Both the spread of TNC investment into new markets in financial services and
so on, and the expansion of stand-alone corporate services, have been associated with the
worldwide trend towards liberalization of financial and currency markets as well as
contingent on new technologies. Telecommunications are the vehicle for international
transmission of the usually intangible products of services activities, which makes it
much more difficult to measure than merchandise trade, especially because intra-corporate
transactions of this kind are not reflected in any kind of financial flow (UNCTAD, 1992).
The unparcelling and relocation of industrial back-office
services functions which comprise part of the growth of international services are
manifestations of TNCs "complex integration" strategy, as discussed above. The
emergence of new corporate services to stand alone, implying in effect a shift in the
categorization of such activities from one economic sector (industry) to another
(services) means that there is a spurious element to the growth in services, driven by
quirks of statistical data collection. Data on services expansion are in some respects
therefore more significant as indicators of changes in production organization than as
indicators of changes in total production and the growth of economic activity.
Nevertheless, overall the various difficulties of measurement of trade in services are
thought to produce a significant downward bias in estimates of world trade in services
(GATT, 1994:90). The difficulties include lack of agreement among countries on
definitions, frequent misclassification of transactions as factor income or transfers,
failure of several large countries to report services trade at all, failure to register
many transactions at all, especially because measurement is through the financial
reporting system and transactions are not mirrored in a financial flow — e.g.
intra-firm transactions — are not captured at all (ibid.).
The services sector has in recent years become much more
important in foreign direct investment; it accounted for 40 per cent of the total
originating in the major industrialized countries in 1980 (Bailey et al., 1993). With
respect to Japanese foreign direct investment, for which data are available separately
(Watanabe, 1993), investment in the tertiary sector was US$ 164 billion over the five year
period 1986-1990, compared to US$ 57 billion in manufacturing (Watanabe, 1993). The
absolute amount invested was highest in North America and Europe, but it was very
substantial in Latin America (where investment in services amounted to US$ 22 billion,
including US$ 13 billion in finance and insurance, compared to US$ 2 billion in
manufacturing) and also in Asia, although here the concentration on services was much less
marked (e.g. US$ 15 billion, of which US$ 3.5 billion was in finance and insurance,
compared to US$ 11 billion in manufacturing) (Watanabe, 1993).37
Internationally supplied producer services exist at all
stages of the production process: upstream (feasibility studies, market research, product
design), "onstream production of goods" (e.g. quality control, equipment
leasing), "onstream parallel" (accounting, personnel management, legal services;
management consultancy) and "downstream" (marketing, advertising,
transportation, distribution) (UNCTAD, 1992). This proliferation of activities illustrates
why, with changes in production organization, the services sector has expanded so rapidly
worldwide.
The trade regulatory conditions under which trade in
international services has developed are hybrid. International transactions in some
activities (e.g. in the financial sector) essentially invoke the rules of establishment of
an enterprise in a foreign nation — which range from very tight, often absolute,
national government restrictions concerning foreign investment in the national (i.e.,
non-EPZ) setting, to freedom to establish, subject to conformity to national standards in
particular sub-sectors and so on (Hindley, 1991). Widespread relaxation of establishment
provisions over the past few years, connected to the general liberalization of foreign
investment laws in developing countries, has greatly facilitated expansion.
In "labour services", by contrast, trade
provisions are effectively ceded to consular and immigration procedures which have the
power to confer — more often to deny — temporary right of abode to individuals.
The rules have been highly discriminatory between individuals according to their skill
qualification, and show no sign of harmonization or liberalization among countries. As a
trade transaction, movement of labour remains uniquely and immediately subject to
contemporaneous national political considerations.
Finally, transmission of data by telecommunications, the
whole field of telematics, has been completed unregulated and beyond the scope of
conventional trade regulations set up to deal with the imposition of quotas and tariffs on
merchandise trade (Hindley, 1991). Nevertheless, the Uruguay Round enshrines a new
non-discriminatory principle for foreign providers of services (similar to that for
manufactures) though governments' right to maintain national standards is upheld —
for prudential measures concerning deposits in the financial sector, for example (GATT
Secretariat, 1994). One of the main tasks of the new World Trade Organisation is to move
forward with the task of harmonizing trade rules for specific services sub-sectors and
extending their scope beyond those established for cross-border trade in tangible goods.
Reflecting the heterogeneity of the international services
sector, developing countries' export capacity is very disparate. But broken down into its
component parts, the pattern becomes clearer.
For some traditional services, very particular endowments
determine the pattern of trade (e.g. natural resources or national heritage for tourism).
For labour remittances, exports may seem to be dependent on "push" factors, or
the absence of resources (i.e., low national income in the sending country) in the context
of a regional history of labour movements. But this is not the whole story. While some of
the main labour exporting countries (e.g. Lesotho, Egypt, Sudan, Pakistan and Bangladesh)38 fit the case, there is also some selectivity towards countries
with above-average human resources, in the shape of educational attainment in the
population. Sri Lanka and the Philippines are cases in point. It is interesting that in
both, the gender gap in education is not severe, and that, perhaps for this reason,
individual women migrants figure importantly among the total stream.
In the case of other services, however, the conventional
model of comparative advantage applies, with the proviso that educational resources would
seem to be a very significant element (Hindley, 1991). All the cases of capacity in the
new international services sector in developing countries rely on the existence of a pool
— either national or local — of well-educated labour. The largest exporters of
commercial services from developing countries are (in order of value in 1993) Hong Kong,
the Republic of Korea, Mexico, Taiwan Province of China, China, Egypt, the Philippines and
Malaysia (GATT, 1994, Table 9). There is a substantial overlap with the list of countries
that rank highly among developing country exporters of manufactures. Some individual small
countries, notably in the Caribbean, are more heavily dependent on services exports but
have only a small share of world trade. These are also all countries with a strong
educational record, and where the gender gap in education is relatively small; in fact in
Jamaica (as in some other Latin American countries) there is a reverse gap, with women
outperforming men in educational attainment.39
There has been no comprehensive assessment of employment
generation in international services in the developing countries, or of the gender
implications. The available evidence suggests that in parts of the services sector, the
situation in export manufacturing is being replicated. In others, however, there is a real
prospect of a high level of women's involvement without compromise of employment quality.
The newness of these sectors may have allowed them to escape the fixed patterns of gender
stereotyping which have confined women to inferior occupational positions in industry.
Employment in tourism, like commerce — but unlike
manufacturing — is an area where local cultural practices related to gender influence
the outcome for women significantly. In Muslim countries in particular, few women are
employed in this sector, although the share of services as a whole in female employment is
on a par with other regions. The issue may turn on concepts of seclusion and physical
separation of the sexes, which make provision of services by women in a public space to
strangers improper. Nevertheless, the situation is not absolutely fixed in terms of gender
segmentation and past experience may not carry over to future limitations on women's
employment possibilities in this field.
The employment possibilities in newly traded services and
corporate relocations may be of most interest from a gender perspective, although the lack
of overall data makes it difficult to assess its likely quantitative significance. Case
studies suggest that activities fall into two parts, distinguished by the occupational mix
and skill level of employees.
First are the "low skill" jobs in data entry.
The situation here is almost a parody of the history of female-labour intensive
industrialization under outsourcing: the workforce is 100 per cent female in the several
cases that have been examined in the Caribbean (particularly Barbados and Jamaica), and
high proportions are found in Malaysia (70 per cent), the Philippines and China (see
Pearson, 1993; Dunn, 1995; Posthuma, 1987). The activities involved include the processing
of air travel data, credit card transactions data, mail orders, etc. Well known examples
from the Caribbean are the establishment by a TNC consortium of an early venture for
processing airline data in Barbados (Gelb, 1995) and the Jamaican Digiport facility,
analogous to an EPZ but where the infrastructure provision is in telecommunications. These
facilities were set up to take advantage of low cost, well educated, English speaking
female labour force within a 3-4 hour air journey from company bases in North America. The
proximity was important at the time because documents for data entry had to be physically
transported for processing; with the growth of computer networks and other forms of
telecommunications this is now less of an issue, so long as communications infrastructure
is in place.
Although in some economies, such as Jamaica, this sector
has been an important source of new, relatively well-paid and prestigious jobs for women
(Dunn, 1995; Pearson and Mitter 1993) some qualification is necessary. To judge from the
few studies that have been done and newspaper reports, this type of employment seems to be
very geographically limited to the countries mentioned and possibly also to India (Pandit,
1995). The technology also changes so rapidly in this field that future prospects are
uncertain. For example, Posthuma (1987) reports on employment by the US publishing
industry of women as word processor operators in China to transform manually typed
manuscripts to printable form. This activity has been made completely obsolete since then
with use of optical character recognition and new printing technologies. There are surely
widespread possibilities of automation of other tasks, such as registration of credit card
counterfoils, in due course. On the other hand, new opportunities may arise, such as the
transformation of printed text by word processor operators into CD-ROM format.
The second sphere of services activities, which includes
specialist producer services and relocated back-office services, seems also to hold mixed
employment prospects from the gender perspective. It includes two main parts: higher level
information technology processes, particularly customized software provision, and
financial and other newly internationalized corporate services.
With respect to information processing, women have a
smaller share of jobs in skilled categories (e.g. systems analysts, computer programming)
than in lower skill jobs (e.g. data entry). Table 12 gives information for Malaysia. It
shows that the share of women in lower skilled jobs is 50 per cent higher than in
high-skilled (68 per cent of total employment in 1987 compared to 38 per cent). The
information in this Table is notable for other reasons, too. It shows how rapidly the
sector has been growing. Total employment more than doubled between 1975 and 1987 and
increased more than threefold for women, who comprised 67 per cent of all employees by
1987, compared to 49 per cent in 1975. The share of women has been rising in most but not
all levels within the sector, albeit slowly and not uniformly within the high-skilled
segment (there has been a fall in the share of women systems analysts as against a rise
among computer technicians and programmers), and the share has been constant in the
low-skilled segment since the mid-1980s.
This should be compared to the way employment
opportunities have diminished for women in Singaporean EPZs with technological upgrading.
Women's access to higher grade employment is clearly penalized to some extent by lack of
scientific and technical training, as in Singapore. But in the Malaysian case, the
restriction was evidently far from severe. The overall share of women in employment in
this subsector is much higher than women's share of employment in the services sector
overall (39.3 per cent in 1988-1990) (UNDP, 1992). Most strikingly, it has risen in the
direct, high skilled segment, where women comprised 38 per cent in 1987 compared to 16 per
cent in 1975.
The prospects for women's employment in other new,
trade-related services such as finance and insurance — sectors in which, as noted
above, foreign direct investment into developing countries, at least in Latin America and
Asia, is marked — is not known. There is no readily available data on the female
share in this segment in developing countries, although it has risen extremely rapidly in
the recent past in industrialized countries (ILO, 1993). The share may also be quite high
in some developing countries. In Malaysia, for example, a case study of two banks shows
that women comprise 32 per cent of officer grade and above in both banks, with women
spread throughout the managerial hierarchy; they also comprise 34 per cent of the officer
grades in the civil service (Wahidin, 1994). The presence of women in the highest grades
(those requiring post-secondary qualifications) is significant here, for studies of
employment practices in banking in industrialized countries show that promotion through
the ranks for women in clerical positions does not occur (Rajan, 1990).
Moreover, as with data entry occupations, technological
progress is proving to be highly labour displacing in the lower skill grades in financial
services (ibid.). Any expansion of job opportunities for women in those grades in
developing countries may be short-lived, although the probable surge in activity in this
sector in middle income developing countries may give the opposite impression. Moreover,
conditions of employment in these occupations, though relatively well-placed within the
modern sector as a whole, have been deteriorating markedly in developed countries, to the
extent that information technology overloads these jobs with previously managerial
functions, without commensurate increase in remuneration (ibid., 1990).
The general distribution of women in place in some of the
relevant occupational strata in developing countries was given in Table 10. This shows
that in developing countries women form a large share of the labour force in occupations
that are particularly relevant to the modern services sector, notably highest level
professional and technical occupations. Higher skill occupations such as these weigh
significantly in the new, internationalized services sector, and account for the depth in
occupational structure in TNCs and the much higher ratio of wages of employees in TNC
affiliates to wages of TNC employees in home countries in services than in other sectors
(as noted above) (UNCTAD, 1992). To the extent that expansion by TNCs in this area of
activities continues, driving if not monopolizing growth in the internationalized services
sector in developing countries, we may expect to see relatively well-paid and prestigious
employment opportunities for women continue to grow proportionally.
31 The scale and pace of the changes in world trade are obscured in academic
research by reliance on established methods of statistical data collection in which, for
example, there is concentration on merchandise trade to the exclusion of services. The
difficulties with measuring production and trade in services, noted later, help explain
why data collection methods have not evolved faster.
32 This is a direct result of structural adjustment policies.
33 Despite much controversy, the balance of opinion now is that regional blocs do
not rest on a strongly protectionist philosophy, have not undermined the general
liberalization of trade and indeed may help promote it. Even so, the global Uruguay Round
embodies commitments that go further than most regional arrangements (Financial Times, 27
April 1995).
34 Note that the "stand-alone" strategy probably predominated even into
the 1980s, as a response to protected import substitution industrialization policies in
developing countries (see Section 2.2 above), and also that TNCs have a major presence in
minerals and other such male-intensive sectors.
35 Thus women workers fared relatively well in employment terms in the recession of
the early 1980s, being sheltered in the services sector which proved relatively immune to
the downturn. The same has not applied in the 1990s.
36 Including sex tourism and the entertainment industry, which are present on a
huge scale in some countries, e.g. Thailand.
37 No comprehensive, detailed data exist for it to be possible here to present
investment data for modern trade-related services alone.
38 All these countries derived 35 per cent or more of their total export revenue
from remittances in 1988 (United Nations, 1992:197).
39 Note, for example, from Table 4, that decomposition of the wage gap by gender in
Chile shows that employed women are better qualified than employed men; also that this
does not, of course, eliminate the crude earnings differential; far from it: differences
in wage structures are even more severe.
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