Globalized Markets, Globalized Information, and Female Employment: Accounting for Regional Differences in 30 OECD Countries

Abstract

Accounting for within-country spatial differences is a neglected aspect in many cross-country comparisons. This chapter highlights this importance in this empirical analysis of the impact of a country’s degree of informational and economic globalization on female employment in 30 OECD countries, using a micro pseudo panel of 110,000 persons derived from five waves of repeated cross sections from the World Values Survey, 1981–2008. I conjecture that informational globalization affects societal values and perceived economic opportunities, while economic globalization impacts actual economic opportunities. A traditional cross-country analysis suggests that the informational dimension of globalization but not the economic one increases the probability of employment for women—contradicting the Becker (1957) hypothesis of international competition mitigating discrimination in employment. However, accounting for subnational regional gender heterogeneity reveals that the impact of worldwide information exchange works rather at the regional level, while economic globalization (trade) increases female employment in general.

JEL Classification C33, D83, F14, F16, F66, J16, J71, R23, Z13

A previous version of this paper was circulated under the title “Globalization, female employment and regional differences in OECD countries,” available as MPRA working paper No. 45756, April 2013.

Appendix

Table 13.6 Composition of economic and informational globalization indices

Table 13.7 Complete estimation results

Table 13.8 Predicted employment probabilities for men and women

Qualitatively, a marginal effects analysis for the baseline model in column 1 of Table 13.2 in the main text yields identical results as the marginal effects reported in Table 13.3 of the main text. For reasons of completion, Table 13.8 is briefly discussed here: In the case of economic globalization we observe that predicted employment probabilities of both men and women fall; however, the difference in employment probability across gender remains roughly constant. Thus we can conclude: as economic globalization increases, relative employment probability for women is not changed.

In the case of informational globalization, however, the decline in employment likelihood is asymmetric across gender: this decline occurs more rapidly for men than for women. At the minimum of informational globalization employment probabilities are 99.8 % for men and 68.6 % for women, while at its maximum employment probabilities have almost equalized (55.3 % vs. 56.8 %). In sum, when informational globalization gains momentum predicted employment likelihoods fall much faster for men than for women; put differently, relative to men, women gain in employment probability as national exposure to cross-cultural contacts intensifies.