Foreign Investors and Gender Provisions in Trade Agreements

• In Event: What Trade Agreements Accomplish

Abstract

Recent regional trade agreements (RTAs) have started to include gender-related provisions to promote gender equality. While scholars have explored the determinant and effectiveness of gender-related provisions in trade agreements, little attention has been paid to how business interests as one of the main actors respond to such gender provisions. In this article, I argue that foreign investors have divergent responses to the component of gender provisions in trade agreements: investors will decrease their investment in the male-dominated and low-skilled labor endowered industries but increase investment in the female-dominated and high-skilled labor endowed industries. I test my argument by using datasets of gender-related provisions in RTAs and the sector-level disaggregated foreign direct investment data between 1997 and 2016.

Author

• Mi Jeong Shin, Korea University