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Trading to equality?
Bisnath, Savitri
Bisnath, Savitri
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bisnaths.pdf
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Abstract
"We need a new strategy for development which involves all the international and national stake-holders at the highest level - a truly integrated strategy which embraces not only trade and investment, but also sustainable development, debt relief, capacity building, health care, education, social safety nets, poverty eradication, human rights, cultural diversity, gender equality – in short what we call “human security” - all are subjects which must be embraced in an improved concept of global economic management. Ruggiero, 1999a (emphasis added) This statement made by Renato Ruggiero, the former director-general of the World Trade Organization (WTO), highlights the complexity and importance of international trade at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Advances in technology, communications and access to information, coupled with the intensification of international flows of goods, services and capital serve to both deepen interdependence between countries and broaden the scope of globalisation. Further, trade "negotiations in areas such as financial services, telecommunications and maritime transport demonstrate that few people around the world will remain untouched by some aspect of the WTO’s activities” (Ruggiero, 1996). In this paper I will attempt to construct a narrative of trade liberalization as a gendered, political and historically constituted process. I argue that the market is a gendered socio-economic formation by building on the notion that the economic is not prior to the social, but constitutive of it. Through this argument I claim that to better understand the effects of international trade policies on women and men it is necessary to document, analyse and theorise about the ways in which their positions in production and reproduction, within specific spatial and temporal contexts, influences exports and imports and market structures. In addition analyses of the institutions that facilitate economic liberalisation, such as the WTO, are critical to understandings of the gendered dimensions of trade policies. In this context I will situate the World Trade Organization within the historical moment in which it was established and analyse its role and importance as both a pillar of the global governance architecture and an important institution to the multilateral trading regime. I will trace its evolution from the GATT, through the changing policy environments of the last thirty years: namely from structural adjustment to privatisation and trade liberalisation. In addition, I argue that the legally binding nature of the new trade agreements, coupled with the strong enforcement capabilities of the WTO, make trade policies as important vehicles for promoting and implementing economic and (indirectly) social policies, as well as regulating and disciplining nation-states. To illustrate this point I briefly discuss the formal relationship between the international financial institutions (IFIs) and the World Trade Organization, as well as potential changes in domestic regulation resulting from implementation of the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS). "(pg 3)
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2005-05
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With permission of the license/copyright holder