Gender China And The World Trade Organization

China’s joining the World Trade Organization at the end of 2001 signifies a milestone in the country’s global integration after two decades of economic reforms that have fundamentally transformed the economic organization of China. This collection seeks to identify the gendered implications within China of the country’s transition from socialism to a market economy and its opening up to international trade and investment. The changes have created greater wealth for some, while at the same time, serious gender, class, ethnic, and regional disparities have also emerged. Drawing from historical, analytical, and policy-oriented work, the essays in this collection explore women’s well-being relative to men’s in rural and urban China by looking at land rights, labor-market status and labor rights, household decision-making, health, the representation of women in advertising and beauty pageants. This book was previously published as a special issue of the journal, Feminist Economics, the official journal of the International Association for Feminist Economics (IAFFE). All contributions have been subjected to the journal's rigorous peer review process and comply with the journal's editorial policies, as overseen by the editor, Diana Strassmann, and the journal's editorial team, including the associate editors, the editorial board, numerous volunteer reviewers, and the journal's in-house editorial staff and freelance style editors. The special issue and book have been made possible by the generous financial support of Rice University and the Ford Foundation-Beijing.

Trade can dramatically improve women’s lives, creating new jobs, enhancing consumer choices, and increasing women’s bargaining power in society. It can also lead to job losses and a concentration of work in low-skilled employment. Given the complexity and specificity of the relationship between trade and gender, it is essential to assess the potential impact of trade policy on both women and men and to develop appropriate, evidence-based policies to ensure that trade helps to enhance opportunities for all. Research on gender equality and trade has been constrained by limited data and a lack of understanding of the connections among the economic roles that women play as workers, consumers, and decision makers. Building on new analyses and new sex-disaggregated data, Women and Trade: The Role of Trade in Promoting Gender Equality aims to advance the understanding of the relationship between trade and gender equality and to identify a series of opportunities through which trade can improve the lives of women.

How trade liberalization affects women’s position in the labour market and what role public policy should play to make the process work better for women are among some of the most debated issues in academic communities and in policy-making arenas. This work sheds light on these contentious issues by analysing the trends in labour market outcomes of women and men in China in the decade after its accession to the World Trade Organization (WTO). The publication reviews the changes associated with China’s economic reforms and opening to international trade and investment since the process started in the late 1970s. Since the early 2000s, a wide range of policy measures have been introduced to strengthen labour market regulations, reduce inequality and increase social security. However, most of these policy initiatives were ‘gender neutral’, paying inadequate attention to the institutional constraints that disadvantaged women in the labour market.

ø Policy makers will benefit from the expert knowledge and policy lessons presented in this book, and development economists and researchers will profit from its critical examination of the world trading system. Undergraduate and postgraduate studen

Offers a systematic, up-to-date evaluation of the debate relating to international trade law, policy and gender equality.

China's entry into the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 2001 was heralded as historic, and for good reason: the world's most populous nation was joining the rule-based system that has governed international commerce since World War II. But the full ramifications of that event are only now becoming apparent, as the Chinese economic juggernaut has evolved in unanticipated and profoundly troublesome ways. In this book, journalist Paul Blustein chronicles the contentious process resulting in China's WTO membership and the transformative changes that followed, both good and bad – for China, for its trading partners, and for the global trading system as a whole. The book recounts how China opened its markets and underwent far-reaching reforms that fuelled its economic takeoff, but then adopted policies – a cheap currency and heavy-handed state intervention – that unfairly disadvantaged foreign competitors and circumvented WTO rules. Events took a potentially catastrophic turn in 2018 with the eruption of a trade war between China and the United States, which has brought the trading system to a breaking point. Regardless of how the latest confrontation unfolds, the world will be grappling for decades with the challenges posed by China Inc.

This handbook provides a holistic understanding of what the World Trade Organization does, how it goes about fulfilling its tasks, its achievements and problems, and how it might contend with some critical challenges.

Equal rights between men and women are enshrined as a fundamental human right in the UN Charter, and reflected in various internationally agreed instruments, such as the 1979 Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women and the 1995 Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action. Although there has been notable progress in some areas, in most nations women are still at a disadvantage in terms of their role and position in the economic and political arenas. This publication examines the gender dimension of trade and seeks to identify policy challenges and responses to promote gender equality in light of increasing globalisation. Issues discussed include: economics of gender equality, international trade and development; multilateral negotiations on agriculture in developing countries; gender-related issues in the textiles and clothing sectors; international trade in services; gender and the TRIPS Agreement; the impact of WTO rules on gender equality; human rights aspects; fair trade initiatives; the role of IT in promoting gender equality, the Gender Trade Impact Assessment and trade reform.