Women and trade

Conference on Trade and Gender

Closing the Gender Gaps

The Buenos Aires Declaration on Women and Trade at Year One by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Netherlands, the World Trade Organization and the World Bank Group

Geneva, WTO Headquarters - Room D
09:00-17:00

The Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Netherlands, the World Trade Organization and the World Bank Group hereby invites you to a one and a half-day conference in Geneva on 6 and 7 December 2018, in collaboration with the Centre for Trade and Economic Integration at the Graduate Institute, to discuss the impact of trade and trade policies on women and men one year after the Buenos Aires Declaration on Women and Trade. Trade and gender equality are two cornerstones for sustainable development, job creation and economic growth. In order to ensure that increased opportunities from economic growth are realised and that the results are beneficial for all it is important to adopt a gender responsive approach when planning and implementing trade policies. Responsible government, a competitive business environment, supportive institutions and civil society are all needed to fully realise these economic opportunities.

The aim of this conference is to present and discuss the impact of trade policies and entrepreneurship on women and men one year after the Buenos Aires Declaration on Trade and Women’s Economic Empowerment. The event will provide a forum for new empirical and theoretical research on gender and trade. The targeted audience is government officials, private sector representatives, international organizations, civil society actors, academia, and others involved in practical or theoretical work in this field.

Thursday December 6
Venue: The Graduate Institute: Maison de la paix, Auditorium A1A

Live Webcasting

16:30 – 17:00

Registration

17:00 -17:10

Welcome Note

  • Dr Theresa Carpenter, Executive Director of the Centre for Trade and Economic Integration at the Graduate Institute

17:10 -17:30

Key Note Speech

  • Speaker Minister Sigrid Kaag, Minister for Foreign Trade and Development Cooperation, The Netherlands

17:30 -17:50

Trade as a Tool for Women’s Economic Development

Presenter

  • Dr Athaliah Lesiba Molokomme, Permanent Representative of Botswana to the UN in Geneva and Ambassador to Switzerland

17:50 -19:00

The Buenos Aires Declaration on Women and Trade at Year One

Moderator

  • H.E. Ambassador Stephen De Boer, Permanent Representative of Canada to the WTO

Panelists

  • Minister Sigrid Kaag, Minister for Foreign Trade and Development Cooperation, The Netherlands
  • Mr Yonov Frederick Agah, Deputy Director-General, WTO
  • Ms Arancha Gonzalez, Executive Director of the International Trade Centre, ITC
  • Dr Athaliah Lesiba Molokomme, Permanent Representative of Botswana to the UN in Geneva and Ambassador to Switzerland
  • Ms Kathrin Puhan, Certification Partner, WEConnect International (Switzerland)
  • Ms Pamela Coke-Hamilton, the Director of the Division on International Trade and Commodities, UNCTAD

Reception in the hall of Petal 2

Friday December 7
Venue: World Trade Organization, Room D

8:30 - 9:00

Coffee/Registration

9:00 - 9:30

Opening Remarks and Introduction to the Workshop

  • Robert Koopman, Chief Economist and Director of the Economic Research and Statistics Division, WTO
  • Antonio Nucifora, Practice Manager, Macroeconomics, Trade & Investment Global Practice, WBG
    presentation
  • Marcel Vernooij, Deputy Permanent Representative of Kingdom of The Netherlands to the WTO and of the Head Economic & Development unit of the Netherlands Mission

Session 1

The Gender Effects of Trade

Moderator

  • Theresa Carpenter, Executive Director of the Centre for Trade and Economic Integration at the Graduate Institute

9:30 - 10:00

Paper 1: Linkages Between Trade and Gender

Presenter

  • Nadia Rocha, Senior Economist, Macroeconomics, Trade & Investment Global Practice, WBG
    presentation

Discussant

  • Jane Korinek, Economist and Trade Policy Analyst, Trade and Agriculture Directorate, OECD

10:00 - 10:30

Paper 2: Gender Pay Gap and Market Access

This research will provide data on average tariffs and NTMs on goods that women mainly consume as well as tariffs and NTMs faced by women in the sector where they work. Trade barriers in overseas markets that limit access for a country’s exports also tend to disadvantage women. The incidence of tariffs and non-tariff measures in the overseas market falls most heavily on women. Products such as food and processed agricultural products, light manufacturing and services that face the highest barriers.

Presenter

  • Floriana Borino, Research economist, Research Department, ILO
    presentation

Discussant

  • Vanessa Erogbogbo, Chief, Sustainable and Inclusive Value Chains, ITC

10:30 - 11:00

Paper 3: Exporters and the Gender Wage Gap

Research suggests that exporters in high-income countries have a higher gender wage gap than non-exporters. As a result, trade liberalization might widen the overall wage gap by shifting resources to exporters. Using employer-employee matched data from South Africa, we test whether this results also holds in a developing country context. Given the prevalence of foreign owned exporters in developing economies, we hypothesize that the opposite is true and therefore trade liberalization can lower the gap in developing countries.

Presenter

  • Caro Janse van Rensburg, Lecturer at North-West University, South Africa
    presentation

Co-author

  • Victor Stoltzenburg, Research Economist, Economic Research and Statistics Division, WTO

Discussant

  • Deborah Winkler, Senior Consultant, Macroeconomics, Trade & Investment Global Practice, WBG

11:00 - 11:10

Summary session 1 - Moderator

11:10 - 11:30 - Coffee Break

Session 2

Opportunities of the 21st Century Female Traders

Moderator

  • Maria Liungman, Senior Economist, Macroeconomics, Trade & Investment Global Practice, WBG

11:30 - 12:00

Paper 4: Gender and Global Value Chain

In order to fill the existing knowledge gap on the implications of GVCs and gender equality, this background paper will analyze whether upgrading in specific value chains leads to an increase or decrease in female employment, and how it may impact the conditions of female work. The research will also identify policy interventions that would limit gender-based constraints to achieve equal benefits for women and men from GVC integration and upgrading. The proposed study will include a literature review of key analysis on gender dimensions of GVCs as well as explicitly examine the impact of technological upgrading on female employment in advanced manufacturing sectors, such as the medical devices. In addition, the research project will examine the potential gender impacts of emerging new technologies and business models in GVCs, e.g. Industry 4.0, from the perspective of developing countries and with a specific focus on the mining GVC.

Presenter

  • Penny Bamber, Senior Researcher at the Duke University, Global Value Chain Center
    presentation

Discussant

  • Claire Hollweg, Economist, Macroeconomics, Trade & Investment Global Practice, WBG

12:00 - 12:30

Paper 5: FDI and Women’s Access to Market

Women-owned or led SMEs face specific challenges to grow or access market opportunities. This is explained by various factors, key amongst them is their limited access to business networks as well as larger firms lack of knowledge of female-run SMEs in the market. Gender-targeted linkages programs that work on offering women-led SMEs linkages to foreign investors in the country is one of the solution areas that could be used to target key interventions. This project will identify women-led SMEs, including them in supplier databases, build awareness of investment promotion agencies regarding their role in this area and build the capacity of women-led SMEs to be able to meet the demand of foreign investors in the country as well as larger local firms. The project will also work with foreign investors to create awareness about the role of FDI in promoting women empowerment

Presenter

  • Heba Shamseldin, Lead Private Sector Specialist, Macroeconomics, Trade & Investment Global Practice, WBG
    presentation

Discussant

  • Claudia Trentini, Economic Affairs Officer, Investment Research Branch Division on Investment and Enterprise, UNCTAD

12:30 - 13:00

Paper 6: Leveraging New Technologies in Closing the Gender Gaps

The paper will analyze how technological developments like e-commerce platforms and other digital solutions enable women's participation in trade through reducing time and mobility constraints. E-commerce has gender implications in that it replaces unpaid household hours of shopping time with paid market hours of work in warehousing and transport. As the distribution of the household hours and the market hours are different by gender, everybody benefits. Digital solutions may also reduce the face-to-face interaction and therefore improve participation of women entrepreneurs in traditionally male-dominant trade networks. Digital payment technology will be highlighted as a way to more easily provide financial services for women. The study will partly be based on a newly finalized WBG South Asia and Southeast Asia e-commerce survey, done in partnership with Kati Suominen and NexTrade, that captures gender-based information of platform users and people in the ecosystem industries.

Presenter

  • Michael Ferrantino, Lead Economist, Macroeconomics, Trade & Investment Global Practice, WBG
    presentation

Discussant

  • Mary Sicat, ICT Analysis Section, Division on Technology and Logistics, UNCTAD

13:00 - 13:10

Summary session 2 - Moderator

13:10 - 14:00 : LUNCH

Session 3

Gender in Policy Formulation

Moderator

  • Pierre Sauve, Senior Economist, Macroeconomics, Trade & Investment Global Practice, WBG

14:00 - 14:30

Paper 7: The Trade and Gender Toolbox - Assessing the Impact of Trade Reforms

The Trade and Gender Toolbox is an instrument developed by UNCTAD, 2017, to carry out an ex-ante assessment of the impact of trade reforms on women. It helps answering the question: what would happen to women if a given trade reform were implemented? When a negative impact on women is estimated, the Toolbox allows designing accompanying measures to prevent these effects from occurring or to minimize them. In the opposite case, when a positive impact on women is anticipated, accompanying measures can be introduced to scale up these positive effects. This paper will present the methodology of the Toolbox, elaborate on its data requirements, and discuss possible future extensions to further ex-ante gender impact assessment of trade policy. The core of the Toolbox consists in the use of a CGE model to estimate how the economy may react to changes in policies (or any other shocks) using actual economic data and equations describing the relationship between the different components of the economy.

Presenter

  • Nursel Aydiner Avsar, Trade, Gender and Development Programme, UNCTAD
    presentation

Discussant

  • Carmine Soprano, Economist, Trade and Gender Specialist, WBG

14:30 - 15:00

Paper 8: Gender in Preferential Trade Agreements

This paper examines whether and how preferential trade agreements (PTAs) address gender issues. Over the years, PTAs have often been dubbed as laboratories in which some countries establish new types of provisions in order to address recent trade-related issues and challenges. While a couple of recent studies discuss gender-related provisions found in selected PTAs (Bensalem, 2017; Frohmann, 2017), the literature does not provide a comprehensive and detailed typology of gender-related provisions in (all) existing PTAs.. This paper aims at filling this gap by identifying both commonalities and differences involved in addressing explicitly gender issue in PTAs. The analysis will cover more than 550 PTAs, including all the PTAs currently in force and notified to the WTO (292 agreements as of November 2018) as well as newly signed PTAs that have not entered into forced yet and/or not been notified to the WTO. The main text of theses PTAs as well as side documents associated with the PTAs at the time of the signature, such as protocols, annexes, communication letters and other documents, will be analyzed.

Presenter

  • Jose Monteiro, Research Economist, Economic Research and Statistics Division, WTO
    presentation

Discussant

  • Rohini Acharya, Chief of Section, Regional Trade Agreements Section, Trade Policies Review Division, WTO

15:00 - 15:10

Summary session 3 - Moderator

15:10 - 15:30 - Coffee Break

Session 4

Aid for Trade to Support Women Traders

Moderator

  • Michael Roberts, Aid-for-Trade Coordinator, Development Division, WTO

15:30 - 16:00

Paper 9. WTO paper on Aid for Trade

87 per cent of Aid for Trade donors surveyed for the Aid for Trade Global Review in 2017 indicated that they have integrated women's economic empowerment into their Aid-for-Trade programmes. Similarly, in most developing members' response it was said that Aid for Trade can meaningfully contribute to women's economic empowerment. All surveyed members consider that Aid for Trade contributes to the achievement of the 2030 Sustainable Development Agenda (figures from the Aid for Trade M&E 2017). Results presented in the M&E focus on specific positive results in gender empowerment and mostly on increasing employment of women, accessing finance and financial services, and including women entrepreneurs in global supply chains. The chapter will look at developing countries gender/Aid for Trade priorities, specific Aid for Trade gender projects, mechanisms to assess results or impact and how much gender is cross cutting in aid for trade projects.

Presenter

  • Anoush der Boghossian, Trade and Gender Focal Point, WTO

Discussant

  • Hang Tran T.T., Senior Coordinator Executive Secretariat for the Enhanced Integrated Framework

16:00 - 16:30

Panel: International Community Engagement in Trade and Gender

Panel

  • Maaike Hofman, Deputy Coordinator Taskforce Women's Rights & Gender Equality, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, The Netherlands
  • Eva Johansson, Lead Policy advisor for gender equality, Sida
  • Dan Hart, Trade for Development DFID/DIT

16.30 - 17:00

Next step

  • Jose Monteiro, Research Economist, Economic Research and Statistics Division, WTO
  • Nadia Rocha, Senior Economist, Macroeconomics, Trade & Investment Global Practice, WBG

Conference report

The Buenos Aires declaraion on women and trade at year one: Conference report

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