Promoting Women’s Participation in Cross-border Trade in South Asia

Abstract

Historically, practitioners and policymakers have overlooked gender issues in the trade space; however, research in recent decades strongly suggests that trade is not gender neutral. Cross-border trade produces changes in employment and prices, and these changes have different effects on women and men. Moreover, because women and men do not have equal access to education, networks, transportation and productive resources, their ability to seize trade-related opportunities differs. General trade barriers, such as deficient infrastructure and cumbersome regulatory and documentary requirements, also have gender-differentiated impacts. Drawing from the global literature, this article proposes policy recommendations to expand the benefits of trade to women in South Asia. The recommendations range from strengthening female-dominated export sectors and implementing trade facilitation measures to increasing women's access to training, productive resources, information, transportation and trade networks.

Self-concept, self-organization and cross-border trading (CBT) behavior among females in Uganda

“…2.2 Concepts 2.2.1 Cross-border trading behavior. CBT among females has been explained as the behavior of women who import and export, or trade, across one or more borders in Uganda (Damisa and Tiku, 2006;Hill, 2019;Livani and Solotaroff, 2019;Njikam and Tchouassi, 2011) at small scale (Brenton and Soprano, 2018a) and sometimes punctuated with low dignity (Muzvidziwa, 2010). This study measured CBT behavior using the constructs of female dignity, language versatility and exploratory behavior.…”

“…It is evident that supporting women entrepreneurship has positive effects on poverty reduction in agreement with the Sustainable Development Goals, and this study seeks to explore ways of developing capacity for women in CBT with a behavior that enables them to operate at higher echelons of the business sector with bespoke support mechanism that fosters economic development (Derera et al, 2020). It's evident that through FCBT, the females have developed local and regional economies by using creative and dignified responses to the uncertainties that society creates around them (Desai, 2009;Manirampa, 2014;Habinshuti, 2019;Livani and Solotaroff, 2019). These uncertainties vary from financial, limited formal trading platforms, expected subservient roles of limited mobility to immobility imposed on them by society (Muzvidziwa, 2015).…”

“…Research in recent decades strongly suggests that trade is no longer gender neutral and global trade has been repeatedly dominated by females (Krichker, 2020; Livani and Solotaroff, 2019). The Female Cross-Border Traders (FCBT) have been approximated to contribute 40% of all global cross-border trade (CBT) (Gray et al ., 2006; Tanwir and Sidebottom, 2019).…”

Bangladesh Country Gender Assessment 2021

“…These partly explain the high level of women's unpaid work in household enterprises and on family farms (see section 3.2). Bangladesh narrowed by 19 percentage points between 2003(Solotaroff et al 2019, women continue to earn significantly less than their male counterparts. The World Economic Forum's Global Gender Gap Report 2021 estimates that women in Bangladesh today earn an average of only 40 percent of men's incomes.…”