Exports and Women Workers in Formal Firms
Theory suggests several ways in which exporting may benefit women’s employment. However, the empirical evidence is mixed and limited, especially for developing countries. This paper uses firm-level survey data for 91 developing countries to estimat...
| Main Authors: | , |
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| Format: | Working Paper |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
World Bank, Washington, DC
2021
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/239241611764251805/Exports-and-Women-Workers-in-Formal-Firms http://hdl.handle.net/10986/35074 |
| Summary: | Theory suggests several ways in which
exporting may benefit women’s employment. However, the
empirical evidence is mixed and limited, especially for
developing countries. This paper uses firm-level survey data
for 91 developing countries to estimate the relationship
between exporting and the share of women workers at the
firm. The analysis pays close attention to endogeneity
concerns. First, it proxies a given firms’ exports by the
average exports of all other firms in the same
country-year-industry cell. Second, it exploits the repeated
cross-section nature of the data and analyzes how changes
over time in exporting activity are associated with changes
in the share of women workers. The strategy is more immune
to endogeneity problems than pure cross-section regressions.
Third, it tests several mechanism or mediating factors as
predicted by the theory through which exporting impacts
women’s employment prospects. The predictions are confirmed
in the data, an unlikely scenario if exports were a mere
proxy for other correlated drivers of women’s employment.
The results show a large, positive impact of higher exports
on the share of women workers. A conservative estimate is
that for each percentage point increase in the ratio of
exports to total sales, the share of women workers increases
by 0.16 percentage point. Consistent with the theoretical
predictions, this positive relationship is much larger (more
positive) in industries that rely more on women workers, in
country-industry pairs where competitive pressure is largely
from international markets in comparison to less competitive
domestic markets, when social attitudes and labor laws are
more favorable toward women’s work, and when the law and
order situation is more business friendly. |
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