Trading Women's Health and Rights? Trade Liberalization and Reproductive Health in Developing Economies

How do economic and trade policies shape public health? This book adds a new dimension to this global debate, by synthesizing research from various disciplines on how international trade liberalization affects reproductive health and rights. It reviews the direct and indirect linkages between the two, and then focuses in on how the linkages are mediated through women's employment, using case studies from Bangladesh, Egypt, Vietnam, China, Mexico and Sri Lanka. It takes up the issue of how trade liberalization affects government capacity to deliver reproductive health services, as illustrated by Tanzania, South Africa, and the international migration of nurses and midwives. It addresses the policy and advocacy issues for advocates of both reproductive health and rights and economic justice, and shows how trade agreements weighted against the poor in the South have very specific gendered consequences.

Elissa Braunstein is an Assistant Professor of Economics at Colorado State University in Fort Collins. Caren Grown is co-director of the Gender Equality and the Economy program at the Levy Economics Institute of Bard College and formerly Director of the Poverty Reduction and Economic Governance Team at ICRW. Anju Malhotra is Group Director of Social and Economic Development at the International Center for Research on Women (ICRW).