Chapter 4 summary: The gendered employment impacts of the Covid-19 trade collapse and recovery. Authors: Xiao Jiang, David Kucera, Loritta Chan

Summary of Chapter 4 of the Global Employment Policy Review (Second edition).



This chapter uses input-output fixed multiplier analysis to estimate changes in the number of women’s and men’s jobs as a result of changes in exports to the US and EU during the Covid-19 crisis for 44 regionally dispersed developing and emerging economies. We construct measures of “structural” gender bias by evaluating how the industries in which women and men workers were disproportionately represented were particularly affected, distinguishing between the period of greatest global trade collapse from the onset of the crisis up till mid-2020 and the period of relative recovery thereafter. Results are situated within discussions on how the causal channels of the Covid-19 trade collapse differed from that of the 2008-09 economic crisis, on possible implications for global trade patterns and the restructuring of global supply chains, and on the impact of recovery policies in developing and emerging countries as well as in the US and EU. A main finding is that during the period of global trade collapse, there was a roughly equal number of countries for which measures of gender bias are unfavorable to women workers as to men workers as a result of changes in exports to the US and the EU. Conversely, during the period of global trade recovery, there was a sizeable majority of countries with measures of gender bias unfavorable to women workers, a reflection of women workers benefiting less than men workers from job gains as a result of changes in these exports. In short, there were more countries with measures of gender bias that were unfavorable to women workers during the period of global trade recovery than the period of global trade collapse.