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SECTION 4: The Situation In the Five Case Countries
In this section of the paper, the experience of the five
countries included for activities under Phase II of the UNDP/UNRISD project is briefly
assessed in relation to the foregoing analysis. They form a neat set of examples in this
respect, serving to illustrate many of the points made earlier. The discussion focuses on
these, rather than attempting to present a descriptive account of development experiences
and gender relations in each case; this is done in each of the national background papers.
The countries concerned are Bangladesh, Uganda, Morocco, Jamaica and Viet Nam.
Tables 13 and 14 present the available data on the share
of manufacturing in national output and the composition of merchandise exports for the
five countries. Three of the five countries — Bangladesh, Morocco and Jamaica —
figure strongly among the developing countries that have rapidly expanded exports of
manufactures, mobilizing female labour for the purpose. Table 13 shows that over the
1980s, particularly in the second half of the 1980s, Bangladesh and Morocco steadily
increased the share of manufacturing output that was exported. Table 14 shows that by
1992, manufactures accounted for 81 per cent of merchandise exports in Bangladesh, and 55
per cent in Jamaica and Morocco. By contrast, Uganda has a manufacturing sector
(contributing around 5 per cent of GDP) which is even smaller than in Bangladesh, which
has not developed any ability to export.
The structure of manufactures exports is also revealing
(Table 14). In particular, the share of clothing is indicative of the level of diversity
in manufactures exports. On this count Bangladesh is distinctive for its extremely high
dependence on clothing, which accounted for 72 per cent of total merchandise exports in
1992 (and 37 per cent of total exports in 1988 compared to 0.4 per cent in 1980-1981)
(S.H. Rahman, 1992). Morocco and Jamaica had clothing shares of 25 and 13 per cent
respectively. In both Bangladesh and Morocco, processed foods (mainly of fish and shrimp)
are another important source of manufactures exports.
Among the developing countries which have adopted an
export industrialization strategy, it is common to find the highest concentration on
clothing and other highly labour intensive products in lowest income countries. At GNP per
capita of US$ 220 in 1991, Bangladesh is indeed among the world's poorest countries.
The reliance on female labour for success in exports of
manufactures in general and clothing in particular is apparent in all three countries. The
share of women in the total labour force in manufacturing was 64 per cent in Bangladesh in
1994, compared to 35 per cent in both the other countries.40
Bangladesh is the case of female-led industrialization,
par excellence. It is interesting to note that Bangladesh was not included in Wood's data
(Wood, 1991); its inclusion would have strengthened his results. Its degree of female
intensity in manufacturing is extreme, far above the norm for other developing countries,
but consistent with the very high share of clothing in export production. In garments
enterprises, 70 per cent of employees are women (R.I. Rahman, 1993a).
Two small, city-wide sample surveys in Dhaka conducted by
the ILO/ARTEP show that the export sector consists almost entirely of local enterprises
(R.I. Rahman, 1993b). This is not surprising, given the predominance of clothing and the
minimal importance of TNCs in the world clothing industry, as discussed above.41 However, it illustrates clearly the point that reliance on female
labour in export manufacturing is not to be confused with the influence of foreign
employers. Local employers follow economic logic in this matter no less than any
international operator.
The case of Bangladesh is evidence that it is not
absolutely necessary for a country to have a generally well-educated female population in
order to break through into world markets in clothing. Bangladesh has a poor human
development record, with 78 per cent illiteracy among adult women in 1990 (World Bank,
1995b). The general educational level of the population cannot be taken as proxy for the
educational level of the available female labour force when wage opportunities for women
are restricted. Up to the present, the rate of labour force participation among (albeit
the relatively small number of) more educated women in Bangladesh has been extremely low
(R.I. Rahman, 1992). The inference is that clothing employers may be able to recruit
female workers from among this group of the population. Information on the educational
level of women in the manufacturing labour force (and conversely on possible changes in
labour force participation rates among women according to their educational level) would
be very valuable in helping to confirm this possibility, or else to show that [(contrary
to the assumption in Wood (1994)] a competitive, modern sector can be built up employing
workers with minimal levels of education.
By contrast, important information is available on wage
rates in the export sector in Bangladesh. Given the very recent emergence in Bangladesh of
export capacity in manufacturing, and on analogy with the EPZ salary life-cycle effect
noted in Section 2.5, it might not be surprising to
find a lesser wage gap in manufacturing in this case (even though EPZs are not a feature
of the Bangladesh export sector). And so it proves. The average weekly female wage in
manufacturing is Tk 178 compared to Tk 283 for men (R.I. Rahman, 1993b:101); but this
conceals the fact that among unskilled workers the gap is minimal, at 3.9 taka per hour
for males and 3.8 taka for females (a female:male wage ratio of 0.97). [The wage ratios
for other grades are 0.62 for skilled workers, 0.88 for clerical workers and 0.91 for
executive and managerial (R.I. Rahman, 1993b:103)]. A concrete interpretation of the
situation might be that employers, knowing of the prevalence of women workers in the
industry in other locations, are prepared to pay equal wages — even in some cases
perhaps a wage premium to women — at the early stages of export industrialization, in
order to encourage women workers to come forward,42 —
but once the labour supply pattern is established, gender discriminatory forces allow the
wage gap to emerge (through a range of mechanisms, such as differential seniority
payments, marital status bonus or discount, differences in employment contract status,
differential job grading and so on, such as have been observed in other countries) (see
e.g. Anker and Hein, 1986). The situation needs to be closely monitored; more importantly,
it represents an opportunity for public action to prevent a wage gap by gender appearing
among unskilled workers.
It has already been noted that in respect of both the
share of the industrial sector in national output and the composition of merchandise
exports, Uganda has not participated in this experience of female-intensive export
industrialization. Uganda has no current capacity in export manufacturing and the share of
manufacturing in GDP (5.4 per cent in 1990) is significantly lower than in Bangladesh (7.1
per cent) (see Table 13). However, Table 13 also reveals that this represents an outright
deterioration: there has been an actual loss of previous manufacturing capacity in total
and as regards ability to export (albeit very small). This is part of the particularly
disastrous performance of the Ugandan economy over the past two decades, but it is not out
of line with the process of deindustrialization throughout Africa (Riddell, 1990).
Disinvestment from Africa by foreign capital has compounded the situation (Bennell, 1995).
It is a poignant illustration of the intensifying marginalization of Africa in world trade
in general in the contemporary period, and of Uganda's falling out of international
markets in manufactures in particular.
Attempts in the literature to explain the marginalization
of countries in sub-Saharan Africa from world trade have taken two main forms. Descriptive
studies contrast the preconditions of economic success in the Asian miracle countries with
the situation in African countries today, focusing on deficits in physical and policy
factors such as low population density, the failure to transform peasant agriculture, poor
infrastructural provision and poor governance in the sense of absence of macro-economic
policy stability (Riedel, 1993). A more analytical, but similarly pessimistic, approach
focuses on the comparative factor endowment, with the refinement of decomposing labour
into skilled and unskilled labour (Wood, 1994; Berge et al., 1994). According to this
model, African countries are doubly penalized in terms of their comparative advantage in
world trade by their low population:land ratio and by the very low levels of education in
the population. The logic of comparative advantage debars them from developing capacity of
entering world trade in manufactures, except perhaps in some niche markets, such as
processed tropical foods.
The experience of neighbouring Kenya gives some cause for
optimism that Uganda might indeed be able to develop export capacity in non-traditional
products of this kind. Kenya's most rapidly growing export in the 1980s and 1990s has been
horticultural products (flowers, high value fruit and vegetables, particularly green
beans) (Stevens, 1990). Some of these products (e.g. green beans) are grown by large and
small farmers, sometimes on contract to international food marketing companies and
processors; they have the advantage, from an equity perspective, that their production is
neutral by farm size, i.e., that small farmers can produce and market them as successfully
as large.43
Production of flowers for export is a different matter.
Despite its agricultural character, it is in many respects closer to an industrial
process: flowers are grown in large farms, often under plastic housing to allow for
complete control of the micro-climate, feeding of the plants and administration of
insecticides, etc. A contractual wage labour force is used, whose terms and conditions of
employment are akin to those of industrial workers, except that the work is clearly
seasonal. The other region of the developing world that has developed a similar production
capacity has been Central and Latin America (e.g. production of strawberries and other
fruits in Mexico, Chile, etc.). As in Kenya, these countries have been able to exploit
their climatic and seasonal differences from those of the temperate Northern markets of
the largest industrialized countries.
In terms of the analysis in this paper, the important
point to note is that where production of these non-traditional, semi-processed
agricultural products has been developed, it has relied — no less than in the case of
clothing — on the specific use of female labour. But in the case of Uganda, this lies
in a speculative future.
In Morocco, export growth has been most pronounced in the
clothing sector and in certain types of food processing [with 90 per cent and 50 per cent
of production, respectively, currently exported (Belghazi, 1995)]. But exporting took root
widely throughout manufacturing during the 1980s: in 1984, only 10 per cent of all
manufacturing firms were producing mainly for exports, but by 1990 the share had risen to
21 per cent (World Bank, 1993). Employment growth in the exporting sector has been
extremely rapid, increasing by 24.5 per cent annually over the period 1984-1990 compared
to annual growth of 2.8 per cent in the domestic sector (World Bank, 1993). Currently
women account for 79 per cent of the labour force in the clothing industry (Belghazi,
1995).
Wage rates display a different pattern from Bangladesh.
There is a large wage gap by gender in manufacturing throughout the urban sector: in 1991,
the mean female:male ratio in hourly wages was 0.80 (7.4 Dh:9.2 Dh) (World Bank, 1993:33).
The same ratio obtained for the urban labour force as a whole in 1993 (Belghazi, 1995).
Information on changes in wages or in the wage gap by gender over time is mixed. The
gender gap in wages may have widened overall over the period 1984-1989, because real wages
in the export sector declined by 2.6 per cent per annum compared to increases in wages in
the domestically oriented sector of 1.6 per cent per annum (World Bank, 1993). Women
continue to be concentrated in the export sector, so that this is prima facie evidence,
for the case of Morocco, against the convergence hypothesis discussed above in Section 2.5. On the other hand, Belghazi suggests that real
wages in clothing have risen in recent years (to 1993) and that the female:male wage ratio
has improved in this branch as exports have increased. The estimated level of gender
discrimination in wages was significantly less in clothing than in most other sectors, at
about half the level for urban employment as a whole (Belghazi, 1993). Morocco has seen an
erosion of its position in the European market with the rise of much lower cost suppliers
such as Bangladesh and more recently the entry of low-wage East European countries into
the same section of the clothing market (see Table 2). Belghazi suggests that employers
have sought to raise product quality control in response to market pressures, raising
wages as part of this strategy in an attempt to retain good workers and reduce labour
turnover (1995).
There has also been a dramatic change in working
conditions in recent years in Morocco; lower paid, temporary employment increased 2.5
times as fast as total employment and was concentrated in the export sector (World Bank,
1993). Another development was a marked shift in the composition of jobs among permanent
workers in manufacturing, with a rapid decline in the share of unskilled workers from 75
per cent in 1984 to 42 per cent in 1990 (ibid.). Whether this reflects the conversion of a
large number of unskilled workers from permanent to temporary contracts is not known, nor
is the incidence of such changes by gender. But clearly these are ominous developments for
the workforce as whole (cf. Standing, 1989) and, given women's relative lack of education,
there are grounds for concern about the position of women especially. More detailed
information on changes in wages over time is needed to understand the significance of
these various developments.
Like Bangladesh, Morocco is notable for its very poor
human development record in respect of education — which is even more striking in
this case, given the much higher level of national income. The overall adult female
illiteracy rate was 62 per cent in Morocco in 1990 (compared to an illiteracy rate of 1.4
per cent in Jamaica, for example) (World Bank, 1995b); this disguises a significantly
lower rate of illiteracy in the female population in urban areas (49 per cent in
1990-1991), although this is still a remarkably high figure by international standards.
Not only is the female labour force participation rate very low, as noted, but rates of
unemployment, taken to indicate a persons' active desire to take employment if it were
available, are much higher among women than among men in urban areas (32 per cent compared
to 17 per cent 1990-1991) (World Bank, 1993).
Expansion of the export manufacturing sector has created a
completely new source of employment opportunities for women in both Bangladesh and
Morocco. This employment is at rates of pay which represent a major advance on
pre-existing alternatives, even where that employment is exploitative in the sense of
perpetuating a discriminatory gender wage differential. In the case of Bangladesh,
however, the expansion of employment in the clothing industry has not been exploitative in
this narrow sense. In the case of Morocco some pressures tending to raise women's relative
wage rates have been identified. But the situation in both countries requires careful
monitoring and may require public action to safeguard and improve women's employment
position.
Jamaica also has a substantial export manufacturing
sector, but in connection with the subject of this paper its experience is much more
interesting in respect of its presence in the international market in services. It is in
fact a major, if not the major, country example of the replication of female-intensive
growth in manufacturing in the new services sector, as discussed above in Section 3.3. First, it has seen the establishment of data-entry
as an export activity on a significant scale. This industry employs women workers almost
exclusively, in low-skilled but prestigious and relatively well-paid quasi-clerical jobs,
many in the Digiport (an EPZ for services firms, with telecommunications in place of
transportation infrastructure) (Dunn, 1995; Pearson, 1993; Pearson and Mitter, 1993).
Since this sector is described in detail in the national background paper for the
UNDP/UNRISD project (Dunn, 1995) it will not be discussed further here.
Second, Jamaica has seen more rapid growth of the
financial sector than of any other sector over the past two decades. While GDP rose by 19
per cent over this period, the finance and insurance sector grew by 182 per cent and by
1989 it provided 9.1 per cent of Jamaican domestic product (ILO, 1993). Japanese FDI in
Latin America (including Jamaica) has been concentrated in the services sector (Watanabe,
1993), and presumably contributed to this rapid expansion. Foreign investment in all
sectors in Latin America is said to embody an increased export orientation (UNCTAD, 1994).
Table 15 shows that export revenues to Jamaica from "Other private services"
which includes financial services as well as data processing have grown rapidly in recent
years though it is not possible to separate out their respective shares.
No data on the amount of employment so generated, nor of
its gender breakdown, are available in this case. But it is surely significant that the
Latin American region in general, and Jamaica in particular, are notable for their very
high rates of female education. In effect, they are the only countries in the world where
educational attainments by women exceed those of men. The high skill and qualifications
requirements of the new international services sector must predispose employers to invest
and recruit female employees in locations where a pool of educated female labour is
available.
It would be of great interest to monitor this situation,
as a possible test case of the gender equity or employment creation in the new
international services sector. The argument of this paper has been that it is in this
sector that we may look for the best prospects for demand for women's labour on better
terms of employment than evolve over time in the manufacturing sector. Gender
considerations must add impetus to attempts to improve data collection systems for the
services sector, and more immediately to the urgency of undertaking case study research to
understand developments in this field.
Finally, let us consider the situation in Viet Nam. Viet
Nam is a case of policy transition (since 1986) to a market oriented economy. It is a
large (70 million population), poor (income per capita below US$ 200 in 1993),
agriculturally dominated country which has nevertheless — as a great virtue of its
socialist past — a relatively good human development record. Educational levels in
the population are well above the average for countries at the same income level (i.e.,
the adult literacy rate is 88 per cent; 84 per cent for women and 93 per cent for men
(SIDA, 1992).
While a significant industrial sector was built up under
autarky, the switch to market orientation and openness to trade has been reflected in
strong growth of mainly primary exports, especially rice and oil; but also including
labour-intensive manufactures, marine products and processed agricultural goods (World
Bank, 1994). According to one estimate, 38 per cent of manufactured exports in the period
1986-1991 were of light industrial goods and handicrafts, such as shoes, embroidered
clothing, lacquer goods, etc., the majority to Asian markets and much of the production
under sub-contract from Asian firms (Moghadam, 1994:15). Macro-economic policy has been
highly successful in controlling inflation and facilitating economic growth (of around 8
per cent per annum in recent years) but less so in mobilizing savings [the savings rate
stood at 12 per cent of GNP in 1988-1990 (Riedel, 1993)]. Recent high external borrowing
raises concerns about future levels of indebtedness and drastic cuts in the government
deficit have had to be brought about by deep cuts in capital expenditure, jeopardizing
much-needed infrastructural improvements (World Bank, 1994). Education and other social
sectors have also been negatively affected, and there are indications that school
attendance has been falling (SIDA, 1992:10).
The private sector is expanding: in industry, for example,
state-owned industries accounted for 57 per cent of gross industrial production in 1989
compared to 69 per cent in 1976. About 30 per cent of the total labour force is now
employed outside the state-owned and co-operative sectors (Moghadam, 1994).
In stark contrast to the situation in Bangladesh and
Morocco, women's involvement in paid employment is high throughout the economy: thus,
compared to a total female share of 52 per cent in the employed population, women
comprised 43 per cent of the manufacturing workforce in 1989 (SIDA, 1992). This reflects a
long-standing government policy to encourage female participation in production. However,
the familiar pattern of occupational and branch segregation by gender obtains, men tending
to dominate "certain physically demanding occupations...[while] in industrial
branches requiring fine motor skills often exhibited by women, such as tailoring, weaving,
knitting, the proportion of women is higher" (SIDA, 1992:14).44 "In principle, men and women are both rewarded according
to...their work. In practice, women predominate in the lower paid activities and [are
underrepresented] in the management and skilled ranks" (SIDA, 1992: 15). Within the
clothing industry, however, one case study found a somewhat different situation, with a
"large presence of women at all levels, from university-educated managers of
import-export departments to production workers...and everything in-between, including
production managers and quality control managers" (Moghadam, 1994:20). In terms of
qualifications and occupational grades, some under-representation of women is evident at
the national level, but they are certainly present in force; thus, women comprised 37.3
per cent of "scientists, engineers and technicians engaged in research and
experimental development" (a total workforce of 777,000 people) in 1988 (Moghadam,
1994:10).
There is no information on wages except for Moghadam's
significant observation that there was no gap in wage payments by gender in the clothing
firms (some state owned, some in the private sector, some associated with foreign
enterprises) covered in her study (Moghadam, 1994).
The sectoral distribution of the labour force as a whole
is distinctive for the very small share, in international terms, only 13 per cent,
employed in trade and services (tourism, science, education, social services, finance,
administration, etc.) in 1989 (Moghadam, 1994:7). Parts of these services, particularly
trade and tourism, have higher shares of private employment than in any other part of the
productive economy. Within the services sector, finance, credit and insurance also
demonstrate the existence of significant private sector activity (ibid.).
At such low national income levels, the domestic surplus
for investment cannot be expected to be adequate to generate rapid growth. To complement
its small domestic savings, Viet Nam historically relied on high levels of external
financing from the Soviet Union. With the collapse of the USSR, and in the shadow of US
economic embargo, it suffered from a funding crisis which was not made up by credit from
other sources (World Bank, 1994). This helps explains why the government managed to so
drastically reduce the deficit (it had no choice but to do so) and also explains the hopes
now placed on foreign direct investment. In recent years private capital inflows have
become a major source of investment financing, with FDI attracted to Viet Nam as the
seeming next Asian miracle country (Riedel, 1993). Table 17 gives recent data on foreign
investment into Viet Nam. It shows that manufacturing and services (probably mostly
tourism) are the main destination sectors. These investments seem likely to change the
structure of production and employment and promote expansion of the services sector.
In terms of this paper, the conditions would seem to be in
place for Viet Nam to expand export manufactures rapidly, probably — given its low
wages — mostly in labour-intensive products. There is no reason to think that women
would not form the bulk of the labour force for this effort, as they have elsewhere.
Furthermore, the much higher level of education among women in Viet Nam than in Bangladesh
and Morocco suggests that there might also be real possibilities for entry into
international services for export, at relatively low skill levels (e.g. data processing)
and at higher skill levels (software, etc.), on the Indian model (Pandit, 1995), perhaps
to regional markets in the first instance. Nevertheless the possibility must be kept in
perspective. Although — again as a fortunate legacy of the socialist period —
there is a pool of well-qualified women professional and technical workers in Viet Nam,
and the gender gap in education is not pronounced, average educational attainment among
the population as a whole is not high. There is a large drop-off in attainment between
primary and secondary levels, which particularly affects girls (SIDA, 1992). The low level
of national income means that the domestic market for financial and other such
internationalized services is small, relative to that of other established middle-income
Asian countries, so that growth of such activities will have to be based on exports.
The issues for gender policy are, first, whether women
will manage to retain their apparently equitable distribution throughout the occupational
hierarchy in this sector as it expands and more foreign capital is involved. A second
concern is whether a wage gap by gender might appear — the already high labour force
participation rate of women may make labour supply conditions less elastic than elsewhere.
Third, the growing services sector and the involvement of TNCs in tourism might lead to
the emergence of new, well paying jobs, perhaps with an occupational structure less
truncated and biased towards low-skill, low-paid jobs than the export manufacturing
sector. It will be important for current and future gender equity that women are able to
achieve and maintain equal employment opportunities and rewards with men in these emergent
activities.
40 UN WISTAT data for all three countries. The figure for Bangladesh is identical
to that reported in the Bangladesh Statistical Yearbook (Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics,
1993), reporting the findings of the 1989 national labour force survey.
41 Note however that Table 16 reveals significant amounts of foreign investment
into textiles, leather and clothing in some years. Data on the three branches separately
are not available.
42 Some element of defiance of local tradition would be required on women's part to
undertake wage employment in new export industries.
43 There are very important gender issues here, to do with gender biases in the
allocation of labour and control of land and crop revenues, which mean that women farmers
- despite being the majority in many African countries - may not have access to this
production on their own account or see much income benefit from it. This is not the place
to discuss such issues in depth.
44 Note that the type of explanation of occupational segregation by gender
presented here was not subscribed to in Sections 2.2. and 2.3, because it reproduces
gender stereotypes about worker characteristics and "appropriate" work.
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