Session IV
Regional and Bilateral Trade Agreements
1. The topic was introduced by Dr. Mariama Williams through a presentation on “Gender, RTAs and the Multilateral Trading System: Setting the Context”. In her presentation, she highlighted the recent proliferation of RTAs with existence of more than 250 RTAs accounting for 50% of the world trade. She briefly explained issues like the need for engaging in RTAs, consistency of RTAs with the WTO, RTA and WTO commonalities and potential differences, pros and cons about the benefits of RTAs. RTAs have significant social, gender and development implications as they offer deeper coverage than WTO, extend into areas of domestic disciplines such as competition, government procurement etc, and some of the RTAs also cover the services sector. However, RTAs do not actually address gender issues and the social dimension of the impact of different agreements is only recently being recognised.
2. Dr. Veena Jha, Co-ordinator, UNCTAD-India, made a presentation on “Regional and Bilateral Trade Agreements- The South Asia Experience”. In her presentation, she highlighted the important trade and employment issues for women and shared the findings that the number of women working in the informal sector is estimated to have risen during the phase of economic liberalisation in India and other South Asian countries with the highest participation in sectors such as textiles and garments, dairy, marine products, carpet industry etc. She highlighted the sectors in which there is a predominance of women in the work force namely, agriculture and allied commodities, a wide range of manufacturing sectors from micro activities to assembly lines, from handicrafts, toys, food processing to pharmaceuticals, communications and hardware. Infact, it is found that in the services sector, there is a higher level of women empowerment than in the agriculture and manufacturing sector and women are playing an increasingly important role in the services sector. There is a noticeable feminization of the services sector, such as retailing and distribution, professional, ICT, educational, tourism, financial, audio-visual, environmental and telecommunications sector.
3. Dr. Veena Jha presented the findings of the Study conducted by UNCTAD-India on the impact of trade liberalisation in the SAFTA scenario on women in select sectors in which they participate in the South Asian region. The Study identified the gender intensive sectors (women dominated) in the employment gaining and the employment losing sectors of the South Asian countries resulting from trade liberalisation under SAFTA. The trade policy suggestions emerging from the study are given below:-
- In the sectors where there is a predominance of female workers, there is a case for multilateral negotiations to centre around faster liberalised access of these products to developed countries markets.
- All such products could be classified as Gender Sensitive Products (GSPs) and their liberalized access to global markets could engender employment creation.
The liberalised access of GSPs to developed country markets would have significant poverty alleviation effects as increases in women’s employment/wages is well established to have macro poverty alleviation effects on society at large. She concluded by saying that the generation of employment and better incomes for women, therefore, requires that these Gender Sensitive Products to be characterised ‘global public goods’ in multilateral economic discourse.
4. Mr. R.S. Ratna, Director, Department of Commerce, in his presentation, highlighted India’s engagement in FTAs/PTAs with a focus on the RTAs to which other South Asian countries are members. He highlighted the sectors in which there is a significant presence of women which include agriculture, food processing industry, textiles, handicrafts, electronic & electrical , gems & jewellery and leather. Some of these sectors like gems & jewellery, leather are experiencing liberalisation. While tariff liberalisation of a Sector is expected to put pressure on the industry to compete by increasing efficiency & reducing profits (which may in turn include cutting down labour or increase working hours), it is likely that there is not much direct impact of trade liberalisation on employment on account of implementation of FTAs in sectors which are in the Negative Lists. He suggested the way forward could be an examination of each country’s commitments in FTAs and PTAs and identification of sectors which have a significant presence of women workforce. It would be important to carry out further examination about their likely effect on women employment/entrepreneur –positive benefits versus negative effect. Further, it would be important to do an impact analysis of its contribution to economic conditions especially in gender. He emphasized that it is most important that the policy makers, civil society & concerned sectoral partners are sensitized to this issue.
This was followed by a brief presentation by the participant from Pakistan explaining the current status of Pakistan’s engagement in Regional Trading Arrangements.
5. The session ended with an overview of the impact assessment of trade liberalisation by Dr. Mariama Williams. She briefly outlined the strategies which could be adopted in different scenarios to maximize the gains from trade liberalisation when it yields new opportunities or to minimize the negative effect of trade liberalisation when it yields contraction of some existing opportunities for men and women, firms and government. There may also be a scenario where trade liberalisation yields new legal framework that changes entitlements, rights and responsibilities and access to assets and government services. She highlighted the critical questions which need to be emphasised as well as the action areas required to deal with differential impact of trade liberalization.
