SECTION 3: Looking to the Future: New Patterns In Trade and Production Organisation

3.1 Overview

This paper has argued that growth in manufactures exports in developing countries has had a highly significant gender impact in raising the level of women's participation in wage employment in the modern sector, but that it has failed to improve the terms of women's insertion in the labour market. The world is seeing very marked changes, however, in the nature and composition of world trade,³¹ and in the cross-country links between and within enterprises. To limit the discussion to the manufacturing sector alone is to turn away from current realities of the globalizing economy. The issue, from a gender perspective, is whether the past effects in manufactures are likely to be replicated in future in these new areas, as trade expands. Are the same economic forces at work, and likely to produce the same outcome for women?

New technologies are permitting wide-ranging reorganization of production processes worldwide with employment implications. This is reflected in new production arrangements within transnational corporations (TNCs) and new patterns of foreign investment, as well as rapid changes in the balance of different types of international economic transactions, specifically the rise in internationally traded services. Trade rules have had an uneven effect on the pattern of trade and geographical distribution of services so far, but under the Uruguay Round steps were taken to harmonize and liberalize treatment of service transactions, so the trends are likely to continue or even intensify. Even though extremely little is known about the employment effects of such changes in developing countries so far, and there has been no assessment of the gender aspect, it is important that these developments be brought to researchers' and policy makers' attention.
 

3.2 Transnational Corporations

During the 1990s, there has been a renewal of academic interest in TNCs as agents of economic globalization. The debate on the "new international division of labour" that started in the 1970s concentrated on the relocation of certain TNC activities to low wage sites in the developing countries; but now the interest in TNCs is much more far-reaching. The climate in developing countries has changed dramatically over the past decade to become much more welcoming of foreign investment as a source of capital for investment and as a means of technology transfer in a reasonably manageable form (Lall, 1994). The amount of foreign direct investment flowing internationally has increased and developing countries in total have been taking an increasing share. The main changes in the geographical pattern have been that Latin American countries, from having been the source of capital flight in the early 1980s, have become a major destination region for new investment; that China has emerged, in the 1990s, as by far the largest developing country destination for foreign investment, and in fact to receiving the second largest inflow of foreign investment of any country in the world after the United States; and that Africa seems, by contrast, to be suffering actual disinvestment in recent years, to compound the region's other woes (Lall, 1994; Bennell, 1995).

The nature of foreign investment has also changed. Much is now in portfolio investment, in large part made possible by privatization offers by developing country governments of state owned enterprises; this is particularly important in India (another major new destination) and in Latin American countries.³² But perhaps the most significant change of all has been the spread of TNCs, via foreign investment, into new activities such as infrastructure and services. The share of services in the total world stock of foreign investment rose from an estimated 25 per cent in 1970 to 50-60 per cent currently. TNCs are the dominant providers in certain service sectors in developing countries (UNCTAD, 1992:166), such as hotels, construction, information technology (including software, hardware maintenance and related services), accountancy, management consultancy and advertising (Bailey et al., 1993:243-4).

Contemporary changes in TNC production organization are distinct from the previous period of expansion in at least three ways. First, they are more integrally dependent on new information technology. The first wave of TNC relocation to low-wage sites was made possible by improvements in transportation, but present day activities depend fundamentally on the improvements in telecommunications and computer-based information processing technology which comprise what is sometimes referred to as "telematics". The precise pattern of spread of new investment is further related to the new technologies, in that telecommunications allow links between all time zones: in a competitive environment, TNCs now need to have involvement in markets (mainly financial) for every hour of the 24 hours in the day. This is another reason to explain the growth of investment to the Asian region, which fills in the time zone gap between Europe and North America (neither Africa or Latin America benefit from this new imperative).

Second, TNCs are now active in supplying regional markets. The pattern of intra-firm and arms-length market trading by TNCs now includes not only old-style South to North exportation, and supply by TNC affiliates to local markets in large formerly protected economies in the developing world, such as India and Brazil, but also production for regional markets. Intra-regional trade has grown faster than total world trade over the past decade (e.g. intra-Asian trade grew at 9.5 per cent per annum from 1980-1992, compared to growth in world trade of 5.5 per cent per annum (Joekes and Weston, 1994:6).³³ The proportion of world trade conducted within regional groupings now accounts for 50.4 per cent of world trade, compared to 41 per cent in 1958 (WTO, 1995). Formal regional economic arrangements have multiplied in recent years; for example 33 new arrangements were notified to the GATT in 1990-1994, compared to 11 for the whole of the 1980s (ibid.).

Third, the ways in which TNCs organize their production facilities among countries is changing. The current phase has been called a "complex integration" strategy (United Nations, 1994). It comprises the full dispersal of corporate departments across the globe, to take advantage of telecommunications possibilities and time zone straddling, setting cost considerations specific to each departmental operation against factor costs and availabilities in different locations, subject only to some market proximity constraints for products where transportation costs are particularly high or follow-up service capabilities particularly important.

The process of international specialization and integration of production units by TNCs in this way is one of the key features of economic globalization. As an example of how developed the process has become: the production schedules of a machine tool plant in the Philippines, part of and serving other units in a global TNC, are subject to more or less continuous updating by telecommunications according to the evolving production requirements of the other units round the world (ibid.).

This example should not obscure the fact that the globalization process — like the underlying foreign investment and the resultant trade flows — is by no means confined to the relocation and establishment of new operations by Northern TNCs in developing countries. The web of international financial, production and trading links is being spun even more densely among Northern countries than between the North and the South. Northern-based TNCs, despite the growth in the share of investment going to developing countries, are more likely to invest in capacity in another Northern market. Moreover, Southern-based TNCs are emerging as a significant force, especially enterprises from the Republic of Korea and India. Most of their investment is to other, lower-income Asian developing countries, for some of which foreign investment originating from another developing country accounts for over 40 per cent of total inward investment (UNCTAD, 1992). Some of the new industrializing Asian countries have thus successfully made the transition from export platform to exporters of capital in their own right.

The complex integration strategy is significantly different from earlier forms of TNC strategy in other respects too. In previous periods, TNCs either had affiliates which were "stand-alone" operations, self-sufficient production units supplying large and/or protected developing country markets, replicating products of the parent organization; or they practised "simple-integration strategies" based on "outsourcing", relocating certain production activities for production of final or intermediate products to developing countries (UNCTAD, 1992). The latter is the kind of production organization that was analysed in the "New International Division of Labour" debate and fuelled the growth of labour intensive export capacity in developing countries in the 1970s and 1980s, of which the gender impact was discussed above in SECTION 2. The application of complex integration strategies heralds the far wider dispersion of production facilities and employment throughout the world. In respect of employment, it suggests the creation of a deeper employment structure than existed under previous strategies in new locations, because the establishment of back-office functions and whole departments, usually classified as "services", entails the setting up of a more balanced occupational hierarchy than in assembly operations or autonomous, light industrial plants serving local markets. Data on the remuneration of employees in different sectors in foreign affiliates of US-based TNCs in developing countries bear this out: while remuneration of employees in manufacturing in developing countries is approximately 30 per cent of home-country employees, in services the ratio is two thirds (UNCTAD, 1992:33).

Tables 8 and 9 give some data on employment creation by TNCs. Table 8 shows that the rate of change of employment in affiliates in different regions by TNCs based in various Northern countries in the 1980s was highest in the developed countries, but also that it proceeded at a high rate (close to or above 10 per cent per annum in most cases throughout the 1980s) in developing countries as a whole. Within the developing world, however, the experience is uneven with the African and West Asian regions conspicuous by the decline in employment in most cases. Although data for the growth of overall employment in industry and services in the relevant countries are not available, it seems likely that employment growth in TNCs is faster and that the share of TNCs in total employment is rising accordingly.

Table 9 sets the scale of TNC employment in developing countries in perspective, giving data on the share of the economically active population and in the paid labour force employed in TNC affiliates, in all sectors and in manufacturing.

No up-to-date disaggregation is available of these employment data by gender. Thus, we do not know what specific gender effects the latest developments in TNC production are having on women's employment opportunities (although developments in services give some clue; see Section 3.3). The classic study of women workers in transnational corporations (ILO/UNCTC, 1985) has information only up to the early 1980s. That study found that while TNCs in total employed only a very small proportion of the total labour force in developing countries, and very unevenly among regions, employment in TNCs had also been growing relatively fast. The proportions of men and women among TNC employees was thought to have remained approximately constant overall between 1960 and 1980, with the majority of employees being male and women accounting for around 20 per cent of the total in all sectors. Whether this represented a higher proportion of jobs for women than in comparable employment in the sectors and countries concerned is not possible to judge from this study.³⁴

Overall, the issue has to be kept in perspective. As is the case for total TNC employment (see Table 9), employment for women is in aggregate a minor factor in employment creation in developing countries. The phenomenon is nevertheless significant in two ways. First, it is undeniably important in the few countries where TNC operations are concentrated, especially where, as in Singapore and Mauritius, for example, the country is small. Second, as noted, TNC in some respects lead local employers in employment practices, even if by a small margin, and thus contribute to raising the general quality of employment. They may also in some cases (as in Morocco, for example, Joekes, 1982) have taken the initiative in recruiting female employees, and helped to challenge local cultural resistance to women's participation in the labour force and break down previous patterns of gender segregation in the labour market.
 

3.3 The Internationalization of Services

Apart from changes in the production organization of TNCs, the other new development in the global economy is the internationalization of services. The scale of growth in internationally traded services has been such that it now ranks roughly equal with trade in commodities, accounting for about 20 per cent of the total (manufactures trade, at 60 per cent, is the most important part of world trade) (GATT, 1994).

The growth of the tertiary sector in general is one of the best known and unassailable correlates of national income growth. In industrialized countries, the services sector accounts for by far the biggest share of output and employment. But the global internationalization of the services sector may be accelerating the pace of change in middle income developing countries — especially but not only in Asia — compared to what has historically been experienced elsewhere.

The main activities in the services sector in industrialized countries comprise health and education provision, commerce, travel, financial services, public sector employment, and domestic service. The predominance of some of these activities (particularly health and education) reflects the status of the products concerned as "superior" goods in the economic sense, on which personal expenditure rises as a proportion of income as income increases. In other respects (e.g. large public administrations for the delivery of social security benefits) the large size of the service sector reflects the fact that industrialized country governments spend approximately 50 per cent of their budgets administering income transfer programmes of one kind or another for the population.

The supposed tendency for labour productivity to improve more slowly in these activities than in industry is usually held to explain the historically relatively fast growth of employment in these areas (UNCTAD, 1992), and is the basis of the normal prediction that relative employment growth will continue in future. But the computerization of many services functions (e.g. in banking) in industrialized countries in the 1980s and 1990s and job losses associated with this means that simple extrapolation from the past is not in order.

In any event, domestic services sector expansion has in large measure accounted for the steadily increasing absorption of women into the labour force in developed countries in recent years.³⁵ The services sector is also a source of employment for many women in developing countries, although its relative importance and women's representation within services varies significantly among regions. In 1980, the services sector was estimated to employ 69 per cent of the total female labour force in Latin America, compared to 13 per cent in Asia and 19 per cent in Africa and the Middle East (ILO/UNCTC, 1985:9). In terms of representation, the health and education sectors are heavily reliant on female labour in all countries but in other parts of the sector the situation is quite variable (see Table 10). Thus, in Latin America, where the proportion of the female labour force is particularly high in services, the bulk of that employment is in low-paid domestic service; whereas in the Middle East and North Africa, while the overall share in services is about average for the developing world (given the low rate of female labour participation), retailing and commerce, where women workers are few, account for scarcely any part of female services employment.

Trade in services is only relevant to part of the activities across the services sector as a whole. Traded services cover services supplied from one country to another; services in one country supplied to the consumers of another (for example, tourism); services provided through the presence of service-providing entities of one party in the territory of another (for example, banking); and services provided by nationals of one party in the territory of any other (for example, consultancies, construction projects) (GATT Secretariat, 1994).

In terms of the type of activity, this includes some familiar, traditional services, and some which are new, linked particularly with the explosive growth in telecommunications and other information processing capacity, in telematics (UNCTAD, 1992). Examples of old style activity are travel and tourism, transportation of goods and labour services (though in the latter case, to the traditional pattern of individual labour movement and ensuing transfers of remittance income, is added the new phenomenon of contract labour services where a workforce is exported temporarily in the construction of turnkey projects). These are important, large scale activities, some of which are of great national importance to some developing countries. Tourism is also a strong growth area,³⁶ though subject to enormous variation in any case as a function of both cyclical fluctuation in incomes in the tourist-sending areas and political circumstances (for example, perceptions of terrorism).

Nevertheless, it is the new-style traded services which have seen the most rapid rate of growth. In part this is a reflection of new market possibilities, and the fact that the telematics revolution allows foreign entities, experienced in these activities in industrialized countries, to make international sales or to set up affiliates abroad to serve distant markets. Construction, accounting, advertising, management consultancy, data processing (of credit cards transactions, air travel data, data entry to CD-ROM etc.) and software production are examples of the first; banking and insurance and reinsurance are examples of the second. Table 11 reveals that developing countries have on average much lower rates of take-up of insurance by businesses and individuals than developed countries. It gives an indication of the potential that TNCs in services see for the realization of new markets in upper-middle income developing countries. Not only are these countries exhibiting the fastest sustained rates of growth of any countries in the world, with relatively equal distribution of personal incomes which might predispose to wide uptake of new services, but expenditure shares in services of these kinds are proportionally low and markets are therefore ripe for realization.

The growth in new services markets covers the supply of financial and other services, such as insurance, to consumers and to corporations and businesses. There has been an evolution in the functions and composition of the services sector, comprising the rise of specialist services and the emergence as stand-alone activities of back-office functions that were formerly embedded in manufacturing firms and not ranked as separate economic entities. Together these tendencies constitute a general externalization of services, of which an important part involves new international transactions. Both the spread of TNC investment into new markets in financial services and so on, and the expansion of stand-alone corporate services, have been associated with the worldwide trend towards liberalization of financial and currency markets as well as contingent on new technologies. Telecommunications are the vehicle for international transmission of the usually intangible products of services activities, which makes it much more difficult to measure than merchandise trade, especially because intra-corporate transactions of this kind are not reflected in any kind of financial flow (UNCTAD, 1992).

The unparcelling and relocation of industrial back-office services functions which comprise part of the growth of international services are manifestations of TNCs "complex integration" strategy, as discussed above. The emergence of new corporate services to stand alone, implying in effect a shift in the categorization of such activities from one economic sector (industry) to another (services) means that there is a spurious element to the growth in services, driven by quirks of statistical data collection. Data on services expansion are in some respects therefore more significant as indicators of changes in production organization than as indicators of changes in total production and the growth of economic activity. Nevertheless, overall the various difficulties of measurement of trade in services are thought to produce a significant downward bias in estimates of world trade in services (GATT, 1994:90). The difficulties include lack of agreement among countries on definitions, frequent misclassification of transactions as factor income or transfers, failure of several large countries to report services trade at all, failure to register many transactions at all, especially because measurement is through the financial reporting system and transactions are not mirrored in a financial flow — e.g. intra-firm transactions — are not captured at all (ibid.).

The services sector has in recent years become much more important in foreign direct investment; it accounted for 40 per cent of the total originating in the major industrialized countries in 1980 (Bailey et al., 1993). With respect to Japanese foreign direct investment, for which data are available separately (Watanabe, 1993), investment in the tertiary sector was US$ 164 billion over the five year period 1986-1990, compared to US$ 57 billion in manufacturing (Watanabe, 1993). The absolute amount invested was highest in North America and Europe, but it was very substantial in Latin America (where investment in services amounted to US$ 22 billion, including US$ 13 billion in finance and insurance, compared to US$ 2 billion in manufacturing) and also in Asia, although here the concentration on services was much less marked (e.g. US$ 15 billion, of which US$ 3.5 billion was in finance and insurance, compared to US$ 11 billion in manufacturing) (Watanabe, 1993).³⁷

Internationally supplied producer services exist at all stages of the production process: upstream (feasibility studies, market research, product design), "onstream production of goods" (e.g. quality control, equipment leasing), "onstream parallel" (accounting, personnel management, legal services; management consultancy) and "downstream" (marketing, advertising, transportation, distribution) (UNCTAD, 1992). This proliferation of activities illustrates why, with changes in production organization, the services sector has expanded so rapidly worldwide.

The trade regulatory conditions under which trade in international services has developed are hybrid. International transactions in some activities (e.g. in the financial sector) essentially invoke the rules of establishment of an enterprise in a foreign nation — which range from very tight, often absolute, national government restrictions concerning foreign investment in the national (i.e., non-EPZ) setting, to freedom to establish, subject to conformity to national standards in particular sub-sectors and so on (Hindley, 1991). Widespread relaxation of establishment provisions over the past few years, connected to the general liberalization of foreign investment laws in developing countries, has greatly facilitated expansion.

In "labour services", by contrast, trade provisions are effectively ceded to consular and immigration procedures which have the power to confer — more often to deny — temporary right of abode to individuals. The rules have been highly discriminatory between individuals according to their skill qualification, and show no sign of harmonization or liberalization among countries. As a trade transaction, movement of labour remains uniquely and immediately subject to contemporaneous national political considerations.

Finally, transmission of data by telecommunications, the whole field of telematics, has been completed unregulated and beyond the scope of conventional trade regulations set up to deal with the imposition of quotas and tariffs on merchandise trade (Hindley, 1991). Nevertheless, the Uruguay Round enshrines a new non-discriminatory principle for foreign providers of services (similar to that for manufactures) though governments' right to maintain national standards is upheld — for prudential measures concerning deposits in the financial sector, for example (GATT Secretariat, 1994). One of the main tasks of the new World Trade Organisation is to move forward with the task of harmonizing trade rules for specific services sub-sectors and extending their scope beyond those established for cross-border trade in tangible goods.

Reflecting the heterogeneity of the international services sector, developing countries' export capacity is very disparate. But broken down into its component parts, the pattern becomes clearer.

For some traditional services, very particular endowments determine the pattern of trade (e.g. natural resources or national heritage for tourism). For labour remittances, exports may seem to be dependent on "push" factors, or the absence of resources (i.e., low national income in the sending country) in the context of a regional history of labour movements. But this is not the whole story. While some of the main labour exporting countries (e.g. Lesotho, Egypt, Sudan, Pakistan and Bangladesh)³⁸ fit the case, there is also some selectivity towards countries with above-average human resources, in the shape of educational attainment in the population. Sri Lanka and the Philippines are cases in point. It is interesting that in both, the gender gap in education is not severe, and that, perhaps for this reason, individual women migrants figure importantly among the total stream.

In the case of other services, however, the conventional model of comparative advantage applies, with the proviso that educational resources would seem to be a very significant element (Hindley, 1991). All the cases of capacity in the new international services sector in developing countries rely on the existence of a pool — either national or local — of well-educated labour. The largest exporters of commercial services from developing countries are (in order of value in 1993) Hong Kong, the Republic of Korea, Mexico, Taiwan Province of China, China, Egypt, the Philippines and Malaysia (GATT, 1994, Table 9). There is a substantial overlap with the list of countries that rank highly among developing country exporters of manufactures. Some individual small countries, notably in the Caribbean, are more heavily dependent on services exports but have only a small share of world trade. These are also all countries with a strong educational record, and where the gender gap in education is relatively small; in fact in Jamaica (as in some other Latin American countries) there is a reverse gap, with women outperforming men in educational attainment.³⁹

There has been no comprehensive assessment of employment generation in international services in the developing countries, or of the gender implications. The available evidence suggests that in parts of the services sector, the situation in export manufacturing is being replicated. In others, however, there is a real prospect of a high level of women's involvement without compromise of employment quality. The newness of these sectors may have allowed them to escape the fixed patterns of gender stereotyping which have confined women to inferior occupational positions in industry.

Employment in tourism, like commerce — but unlike manufacturing — is an area where local cultural practices related to gender influence the outcome for women significantly. In Muslim countries in particular, few women are employed in this sector, although the share of services as a whole in female employment is on a par with other regions. The issue may turn on concepts of seclusion and physical separation of the sexes, which make provision of services by women in a public space to strangers improper. Nevertheless, the situation is not absolutely fixed in terms of gender segmentation and past experience may not carry over to future limitations on women's employment possibilities in this field.

The employment possibilities in newly traded services and corporate relocations may be of most interest from a gender perspective, although the lack of overall data makes it difficult to assess its likely quantitative significance. Case studies suggest that activities fall into two parts, distinguished by the occupational mix and skill level of employees.

First are the "low skill" jobs in data entry. The situation here is almost a parody of the history of female-labour intensive industrialization under outsourcing: the workforce is 100 per cent female in the several cases that have been examined in the Caribbean (particularly Barbados and Jamaica), and high proportions are found in Malaysia (70 per cent), the Philippines and China (see Pearson, 1993; Dunn, 1995; Posthuma, 1987). The activities involved include the processing of air travel data, credit card transactions data, mail orders, etc. Well known examples from the Caribbean are the establishment by a TNC consortium of an early venture for processing airline data in Barbados (Gelb, 1995) and the Jamaican Digiport facility, analogous to an EPZ but where the infrastructure provision is in telecommunications. These facilities were set up to take advantage of low cost, well educated, English speaking female labour force within a 3-4 hour air journey from company bases in North America. The proximity was important at the time because documents for data entry had to be physically transported for processing; with the growth of computer networks and other forms of telecommunications this is now less of an issue, so long as communications infrastructure is in place.

Although in some economies, such as Jamaica, this sector has been an important source of new, relatively well-paid and prestigious jobs for women (Dunn, 1995; Pearson and Mitter 1993) some qualification is necessary. To judge from the few studies that have been done and newspaper reports, this type of employment seems to be very geographically limited to the countries mentioned and possibly also to India (Pandit, 1995). The technology also changes so rapidly in this field that future prospects are uncertain. For example, Posthuma (1987) reports on employment by the US publishing industry of women as word processor operators in China to transform manually typed manuscripts to printable form. This activity has been made completely obsolete since then with use of optical character recognition and new printing technologies. There are surely widespread possibilities of automation of other tasks, such as registration of credit card counterfoils, in due course. On the other hand, new opportunities may arise, such as the transformation of printed text by word processor operators into CD-ROM format.

The second sphere of services activities, which includes specialist producer services and relocated back-office services, seems also to hold mixed employment prospects from the gender perspective. It includes two main parts: higher level information technology processes, particularly customized software provision, and financial and other newly internationalized corporate services.

With respect to information processing, women have a smaller share of jobs in skilled categories (e.g. systems analysts, computer programming) than in lower skill jobs (e.g. data entry). Table 12 gives information for Malaysia. It shows that the share of women in lower skilled jobs is 50 per cent higher than in high-skilled (68 per cent of total employment in 1987 compared to 38 per cent). The information in this Table is notable for other reasons, too. It shows how rapidly the sector has been growing. Total employment more than doubled between 1975 and 1987 and increased more than threefold for women, who comprised 67 per cent of all employees by 1987, compared to 49 per cent in 1975. The share of women has been rising in most but not all levels within the sector, albeit slowly and not uniformly within the high-skilled segment (there has been a fall in the share of women systems analysts as against a rise among computer technicians and programmers), and the share has been constant in the low-skilled segment since the mid-1980s.

This should be compared to the way employment opportunities have diminished for women in Singaporean EPZs with technological upgrading. Women's access to higher grade employment is clearly penalized to some extent by lack of scientific and technical training, as in Singapore. But in the Malaysian case, the restriction was evidently far from severe. The overall share of women in employment in this subsector is much higher than women's share of employment in the services sector overall (39.3 per cent in 1988-1990) (UNDP, 1992). Most strikingly, it has risen in the direct, high skilled segment, where women comprised 38 per cent in 1987 compared to 16 per cent in 1975.

The prospects for women's employment in other new, trade-related services such as finance and insurance — sectors in which, as noted above, foreign direct investment into developing countries, at least in Latin America and Asia, is marked — is not known. There is no readily available data on the female share in this segment in developing countries, although it has risen extremely rapidly in the recent past in industrialized countries (ILO, 1993). The share may also be quite high in some developing countries. In Malaysia, for example, a case study of two banks shows that women comprise 32 per cent of officer grade and above in both banks, with women spread throughout the managerial hierarchy; they also comprise 34 per cent of the officer grades in the civil service (Wahidin, 1994). The presence of women in the highest grades (those requiring post-secondary qualifications) is significant here, for studies of employment practices in banking in industrialized countries show that promotion through the ranks for women in clerical positions does not occur (Rajan, 1990).

Moreover, as with data entry occupations, technological progress is proving to be highly labour displacing in the lower skill grades in financial services (ibid.). Any expansion of job opportunities for women in those grades in developing countries may be short-lived, although the probable surge in activity in this sector in middle income developing countries may give the opposite impression. Moreover, conditions of employment in these occupations, though relatively well-placed within the modern sector as a whole, have been deteriorating markedly in developed countries, to the extent that information technology overloads these jobs with previously managerial functions, without commensurate increase in remuneration (ibid., 1990).

The general distribution of women in place in some of the relevant occupational strata in developing countries was given in Table 10. This shows that in developing countries women form a large share of the labour force in occupations that are particularly relevant to the modern services sector, notably highest level professional and technical occupations. Higher skill occupations such as these weigh significantly in the new, internationalized services sector, and account for the depth in occupational structure in TNCs and the much higher ratio of wages of employees in TNC affiliates to wages of TNC employees in home countries in services than in other sectors (as noted above) (UNCTAD, 1992). To the extent that expansion by TNCs in this area of activities continues, driving if not monopolizing growth in the internationalized services sector in developing countries, we may expect to see relatively well-paid and prestigious employment opportunities for women continue to grow proportionally.

31 The scale and pace of the changes in world trade are obscured in academic research by reliance on established methods of statistical data collection in which, for example, there is concentration on merchandise trade to the exclusion of services. The difficulties with measuring production and trade in services, noted later, help explain why data collection methods have not evolved faster.

32 This is a direct result of structural adjustment policies.

33 Despite much controversy, the balance of opinion now is that regional blocs do not rest on a strongly protectionist philosophy, have not undermined the general liberalization of trade and indeed may help promote it. Even so, the global Uruguay Round embodies commitments that go further than most regional arrangements (Financial Times, 27 April 1995).

34 Note that the "stand-alone" strategy probably predominated even into the 1980s, as a response to protected import substitution industrialization policies in developing countries (see Section 2.2 above), and also that TNCs have a major presence in minerals and other such male-intensive sectors.

35 Thus women workers fared relatively well in employment terms in the recession of the early 1980s, being sheltered in the services sector which proved relatively immune to the downturn. The same has not applied in the 1990s.

36 Including sex tourism and the entertainment industry, which are present on a huge scale in some countries, e.g. Thailand.

37 No comprehensive, detailed data exist for it to be possible here to present investment data for modern trade-related services alone.

38 All these countries derived 35 per cent or more of their total export revenue from remittances in 1988 (United Nations, 1992:197).

39 Note, for example, from Table 4, that decomposition of the wage gap by gender in Chile shows that employed women are better qualified than employed men; also that this does not, of course, eliminate the crude earnings differential; far from it: differences in wage structures are even more severe.