Daily Independent Online.
*
Thursday, June 17, 2004.
Summit tackles lapses in global trade, gender inequity
Stories
by Ntai Bagshaw
Development Reporter,
Lagos
Over
the last two decades, many developing countries have liberalised their
economies - in some cases more than many countries of the Organisation for
Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). They had high expectations of the
international trade rounds but most are still waiting for the results. Trade liberalisation has changed the
nature of employment, yet the impact of that change has not been the same for
women and for men.
The
11th session of the United Nations
Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD XI), currently underway in
São Paulo, Brazil, is examining how to assure development gains from the
international trading system and trade negotiations. It is also looking at ways
of linking trade-related concerns with development goals in order, for
instance, to reduce poverty and
promote gender equity.
It is
particularly examining how the gender perspective can be integrated into trade
policy and trade negotiations to ensure that the objectives of gender equality
and an equitable multilateral trading system go hand-in-hand.
Today,
women account for 40 per cent of the workforce worldwide but still earn, on
average, only two thirds of what men earn, UNCTAD says. “Trade
liberalisation has changed the nature of employment, yet the impact of that
change has not been the same for women and for men,” it argues.
“Although liberalisation has created many opportunities for working
women, they are still earning less than men and are caught at the lower end of
the pay and skills scales”.
The
conference is UNCTAD’s highest decision-making body. It meets every four
years to set priorities and guidelines for the organisation, and provides an
opportunity to debate key economic and development issues. During the week-long
summit (ending tomorrow), a number of thematic sessions on trade, investment,
finance, technology and development-related topics will be organised around the
main theme: Enhancing the coherence between national development strategies
and global economic processes towards economic growth and development,
particularly of developing countries.
Debates
will focus on ways to make trade work for development, bearing in mind the
outcomes of the recent summits on Financing for Development and Sustainable
Development. Emphasis will be on
improving competitiveness and building capacity in the productive sector.
Developing
countries had high expectations of the Uruguay Round of trade talks and of the
Doha Round that followed. Many of them have liberalised their trade regimes in
anticipation of those gains and the speed of that liberalisation has often
outpaced that of developed countries. After two decades of opening up, however,
the developing world is still waiting for the results.
The
figures tell the story. World trade has risen rapidly over the past two
decades. It was 4.7 per cent last year and is estimated to reach seven per cent
this year, according to UNCTAD. That growth has extended to many developing
countries. Most developing nations, however, can boast only of a small part of
those gains. In particular, the share of the Least Developed Countries (LDC) in
international trade has declined steadily, from 1.7 per cent in 1970 to 0.6 per
cent in 2002.
Much
of the variation in performance can be attributed to the type of trade in which
countries are engaging. High value-added goods and services -
particularly when they are skills- and technology-intensive - can
increase the gains from trade, as some East Asian economies have so
impressively demonstrated.
Their
poverty fell by 40 per cent in the 1990s, while their per capita GDP tripled
over the past two decades, according to the UN Millennium Indicators. At the
other end of the scale is commodity production, which is highly vulnerable to
price fluctuations and external shocks. Somewhere in the middle lie
labour-intensive manufactures which, while frequently competitive, have low
value-added and can spur a “race to the bottom”.
Some
of the biggest gains from trade have been won by countries that have moved into
service exports - a move that has also helped them slash poverty.
Services now account for about 50 per cent of GDP in developing countries as a
whole (versus 68 per cent in the developed world) and trade in services
represents 16 per cent of all their trade and 23 per cent of their share of
global services exports, according to an UNCTAD study prepared for the Sao
Paulo conference. Services now generate about half of all jobs in the formal
sector.
