SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC FACTORS CONTRIBUTE TO GLOBAL BUSINESS

V. Alageshwaran, I B.Com

K. P. Kannan, I B.Com

Government Arts and Science College, Aruppukottai

Introduction

Education is the single most important instrument for social and economic transformation. A
well educated population, adequately equipped with knowledge and skill is not only essential to
support economic growth, but is also a precondition for growth to be inclusive, since it is only
the educated and skilled person who can stand to benefit most from the employment
opportunities which growth will provide. Improvements in education are not only expected to
enhance the efficiency but also augment the overall quality of life. Education is an instrument of
social change and eliminates gender disparities and ensures equal opportunities.

IFAD Supported Programmes

The completion evaluation of the IFAD-supported Tamil Nadu Women's Development Project in
India took place in late 1999. The project had aimed to bring about the social and economic
betterment of women. The core mechanism was the women's self-help groups, which were set up
with both financial (saving and lending) and community action objectives. At the time of the
evaluation, a total of 5 207 of these groups had been formed, almost double the established target
The evaluation noted that, at least in the latter phases, the project acted not as just "a credit-cum-
subsidy project, but as a genuine process of empowerment." The evaluation concluded that such
empowerment lay in the interaction between the social and economic aspects of the project.

Four of the main processes that could lead to women's empowerment, as defined by the IFAD
evaluation, were:

 changes in women's mobility and social interaction;

 changes in women's labour patterns;
 changes in women's access to and control over resources; and
  changes in women's control over decision-making.

Changes in women's mobility and interaction. The evaluation found that women had become
more mobile and begun to have new interactions with a range of officials. There was even a
growing willingness on the part of group members to approach the Panchayats and Collectors
with petitions or grievances. In all, the evaluation found that:

 50% of women group members had visited new places and travelled longer distances;
and
 94% had experienced new interactions with staff of institutions such as banks, district and
block development organizations, NGOs and the project itself.

The study observes that this type of change was most likely to occur among women group
members when:

 the women involved were heads of households or were older;

 the women involved had participated in training;
 their group members had accessed a bank loan;
 their group had undertaken community action initiatives; or
 their group had been organized into a federation and encouraged to participate in special
events (such as Women's Day, Rural Women's Day)

Changes in women's labour patterns. The evaluation did not find any major changes in gender
division of labour. However, there were indications of such changes beginning. For instance, the
group meetings themselves forced some of the husbands to look after children and feed
themselves while their wives attended the meetings. The evaluation found that the extent to
which men helped in reproductive tasks was related to the health of the woman (men helped
more if women were sick), the type of household (men helped more in a nuclear household), and
the gender and age of the children (men helped less if girl children were present to help).

There was comparatively greater change reported in non-domestic productive tasks. Not all the
changes in such labour patterns can be viewed as beneficial to women.
  Fully 30% of women who had taken bank loans reported a marked change in gender
roles, and 70% reported a small change. (Greater change was reported by women heads
of households, which implies that changes in the division of labour were not always
involved, but that the women themselves adopted new productive roles.)
 However, the income-generating activities of the majority of women in male-headed
households (for which loans had been taken) continued to be managed by men
(presumably, the women's husbands).
 The workload of 94% of the women who had taken loans increased compared with their
previous workload (many had been wage labourers).

Therefore, the changes in women's labour patterns were mixed, and not as positive as along other
dimensions. There was little indication that women's control over their labour had undergone a
marked change, and the evaluation noted that many women may simply have gone from
undertaking paid work outside the home to becoming unpaid family labourers (in male-managed
enterprises). At least self-employment allows women the possibility to have better working
conditions, save on travel time, and be able to more effectively combine reproductive and
productive roles.

Changes in access to and control over resources. The evaluation also looked into women
group members' access to non-loan-related resources and benefits, and particularly to common
resources. It seems that a number of the groups undertook activities that would give their
communities better infrastructure or services, for instance in water supply, child-care facilities,
health care services and improved roads. In this sense, they played a key role in promoting
changes in collective access to resources.

Changes in intra-household decision-making. The evaluation concluded that there seemed to

be a slight improvement in women's involvement in household decision-making in male-headed
households, on such issues as credit, the disposal of household assets, children's education, and
family health care. However, the traditional gender-based divisions persist in intra-household
decision-making. Women basically decide on food preparation, and men make the financial
decisions. But group members had become more aware of their property and political rights
(which was part of group training). As in the case of mobility and social interaction, the
evaluation again found greater improvements among women heads of households, older women,
and more educated women.

In traditional societies, even more than elsewhere, women's empowerment does not occur easily
or overnight. In the India case described, there was evidence of such change beginning, to which
the project had apparently contributed. It was most noticeable among certain types of women.
Perhaps one of the most important emerging lessons is that women's groups themselves, in their
social aspects, play a role in such empowerment. This argues for placing emphasis on sustaining
groups beyond the life of the project, which indeed was done in this instance. The project
evaluation also recommended that communication support (films, radio broadcasts and so on,
with sensitization and training content) be used to speed up the empowerment process.

SPATIAL DEPENDENCE IN WOMEN’S ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL RIGHTS

Much of the literature on globalization and gender rights is critical of globalization’s effects on
women. This is generally consistent with many of the views expressed by NGOs and other parts
of civil society that similarly see globalization as something to be resisted because, among other
things, it disempowers women at the hands of the patriarchy and authority of male-dominated
global capital. Skeptics of globalization see the trade and FDI links as exploitative, leading to the
lowering of standards due to the profit motives of globalized capital via a race to the bottom, or
at least leading to a reluctance of the laggards to raise standards (the “regulatory chill” thesis)
(see the discussion and references cited in Mosley & Uno, 2007).Underlying such predictions is
the oft-made assumption that enhanced women’s economic and social rights would add to
production costs and thus decrease a country’s competitiveness in globalized markets, providing
an economic incentive for lagging countries to oppose tightening (see, e.g., Elias, 2004; Enloe,
2007; Klein, 2007; Shiva, 2005; Wichterich, 2000). Yet, this literature has recently come under
criticism for missing the multifaceted ways in which women are affected by globalization;
interestingly, some of this criticism is raised by scholars and writers very sympathetic to
women’s causes (Davids & Van Driel, 2005; Lenz, Ullrich, & Fersch 2007;Young, 2001). As
some have written, “globalizati on cannot be viewed only as a nightmare scenario (. . .) one has
to recall that the reconfiguration of the Fordist gender order also offers an opportunity for
women to develop new strategies to achieve gender equality on a global scale” (Young, 2001,
pp. 46,47).
These arguments critical of the globalization critics are based on the observation that women are
not mere passive receivers of hardship but are active agents that navigate social, economic, and
political life and to whom globalization offers new opportunities for challenging existing
injustices. Such arguments are reminiscent of earlier arguments about the spread of
modernization that allows women a greater part in the social, political, and economic lives of
societies. Modernization theorists would argue that greater contact between to raise women’s
rights in the backward countries since forces of modernization threaten patriarchy and the
discrimination against women (Donno & Russett, 2004). Globalization optimists thus submit that
openness to trade and FDI promote women’s rights by increasing the opportunities for women to
challenge traditional ways, partly due to the advance of modernization. Yet, what should matter
more than openness per se is the fact that trade and FDI link countries with high standards to
those that have lower standards, which could trigger processes of diffusion from the high-
standard to the low-standard countries. The phenomenon where policies, standards or similar
choices of one unit of analysis depend on the choices of other units of analysis is commonly
known as spatial dependence and the hypothesis tested in this article is of spatial dependence in
women’s economic and social rights working via trade and FDI effects. Specifically, it is
suggested that the incentive to raise women’s rights is stronger where, firstly, major trading
partners and, secondly, the major source countries for FDI themselves provide strong rights.
Economic and social rights covered in Cingranelli and Richards’(2010) Human Rights Database
Economic rights
Equal pay for equal work
Free choice of profession or employment without the need to obtain a
husband or male relatives consent
The right to gainful employment without the need to obtain a husband
or male relatives consent
Equality in hiring and promotion practices
Job security (maternity leave, unemployment benefits, no arbitrary
firing or layoffs, etc.)
Non-discrimination by employers
The right to be free from sexual harassment in the workplace
The right to work at night
The right to work in occupations classified as dangerous
The right to work in the military and the police force
Social rights
The right to equal inheritance
The right to enter into marriage on a basis of equality with men
The right to travel abroad
The right to obtain a passport
The right to confer citizenship to children or a husband
The right to initiate a divorce
The right to own, acquires, manage, and retain property brought into
marriage
The right to participate in social, cultural, and community activities
The right to an education
The freedom to choose a residence/domicile
Freedom from female genital mutilation (FGM) of children and of adults without their consent
Freedom from forced sterilization

Conclusion
Women’s empowerment plays a central role in the development debate. How does globalization
affect women’s rights? In contrast to others, this article has analyzed this question in two distinct
ways. First, we focused on spatial dependence, addressing whether higher women’s rights abroad
spill-over into higher domestic rights via trans-national trade and FDI linkages. Secondly, we
employed broad measures of women’s rights that included both economic and social rights. The
question of whether higher women’s economic and social rights among a country’s major trade
partners and investment sources spill-over into higher domestic levels of such rights is a crucial
aspect of the globalization debate.