Globalization and the Gender Wage Gap

By R. Oostendorp. 2004

396 citations recorded by the source corpus.

There are several theoretical reasons why globalization will have a narrowing as well as widening effect on the gender wage gap, but little is known about the actual impact, except for a number of country studies. The author provides a cross-country study of the impact of globalization on the occupational gender wage gap, based on the rarely used but most far-ranging survey of wages around the world, the International Labour Organization's October Inquiry. This annual survey was started in 1924 and contains a wealth of information on wages and the gender wage gap. For the period 1983-99, there is information on the gender wage gap in 161 narrowly defined occupations in more than 80 countries around the world. The author finds the following: (i) The occupational gender wage gap appears to be narrowing with increases in GDP per capita; (ii) There is a significantly narrowing impact of trade and foreign direct investment (FDI) net inflows on the occupational gender wage gap for low-skill occupations, both in poorer and richer countries, and for high-skill occupations in richer countries; (iii) There is no evidence of a narrowing impact of trade, but there is evidence of a widening impact of FDI net inflows on the high-skill occupational gender wage gap in poorer countries; (iv) Wage-setting institutions have a strong impact on the occupational gender wage gap in richer countries.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/983144c2b841928323276cf5c76aa9629c337ced

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Citations in the corpus

Openness and inequality in developing countries: a review of theory and recent evidence (2005, background): “In a recent cross-country study based on occupational wage data from the ILO october Inquiry, Oostendorp (2004) finds that higher trade and FDI net inflows caused gender wage gaps in relatively low-paid occupations in low and lowermiddle income developing countries to narrow.”
A multidisciplinary survey on discrimination analysis (2013, background): “Oostendorp (2009), in contrast with Neumayer and de Soysa (2007) and Black and Brainerd (2004), concludes that globalization may even increase the gender gap.”
Gender Equality and Economic Growth: Is there a Win‐Win? (2013, methodology): “The possibility of some ‘threshold’ level of per capita GDP differentiating the impact of growth between poor and better off countries is also supported by Oostendorp (2009). He found that economic growth together with trade and FDI flows led to a decline in the gender gap in wages in wealthier coun”
Gender Equality in Employment in Africa: Empirical Analysis and Policy Implications (2013, background): “As authors like Oostendorp (2009) have argued, FDI is assumed to be positively associated with gender equality in employment.”
Gender Inequality and Trade (2006, background): “As we cannot determine whether differences in labour market 6 Data sources for these and all other variables are reported in Appendix A. 7 Oostendorp (2004) provides an extensive description of the ILO October Inquiry database.”
Globalization and gender equality in the course of development (2012, background): “Richards and Gelleny (2007) investigate the influence of economic globalization on women’s status using a dataset that contains 130 countries over 1982-2003.”
Globalisation, Women's Economic Rights and Forced Labour (2007, background): “In a country study of South Korea, Seguino (1997) finds that the gender wage gap can explain some of the country’s growth in exports.”
Drivers of Gendered Sectoral and Occupational Segregation in Developing Countries (2020, result): “This theory has been the subject of much empirical investigation, mostly with regard to gender wage gaps, finding results that both support and counter Becker’s theory (Black and Brainerd 2002; Berik, van der Meulen Rodgers, and Zveglich 2004; Kongar 2007; Oostendorp 2009).”
Gender equity and globalization: Macroeconomic policy for developing countries (2006, background): “A negative effect of export-orientation on female relative wages has been found in several studies that cover developing and developed economies (Gupta, 2002; Oostendorp, 2004).”