Distributional effects of graduation from the EU’s GSP scheme: Can the GSP trade preference scheme have gender-specific effects?

Lunds universitet/Nationalekonomiska institutionen 2019

The objective of the EU’s trade preference scheme GSP is to alleviate poverty, create jobs and promote international principles and values. Graduation is when a certain product group or beneficiary country loses its EU GSP trade preferences, after having reached a predefined level of development or having become too competitive. This thesis analyses the graduation mechanism in the EU GSP in terms of distributional effects. The ambition is to assess if certain industries have been impacted differently by the graduation policy, notably the industries in which the data suggests that women tend to work. In order to examine such potential distributional effects, manufacturing industry data on employment levels is incorporated in a fixed effects model in which the episodes of product graduation from the EU’s GSP function as a dummy variable. The baseline specification regressions cannot establish any relationship between graduation and manufacturing employment. The result of a subsample analysis shows weak evidence of a negative link between graduation and manufacturing employment in female-dominated industries, but the link is not robust.
The objective of the EU’s trade preference scheme GSP is to alleviate poverty, create jobs and promote international principles and values. Graduation is when a certain product group or beneficiary country loses its EU GSP trade preferences, after having reached a predefined level of development or having become too competitive. This thesis analyses the graduation mechanism in the EU GSP in terms of distributional effects. The ambition is to assess if certain industries have been impacted differently by the graduation policy, notably the industries in which the data suggests that women tend to work. In order to examine such potential distributional effects, manufacturing industry data on employment levels is incorporated in a fixed effects model in which the episodes of product graduation from the EU’s GSP function as a dummy variable. The baseline specification regressions cannot establish any relationship between graduation and manufacturing employment. The result of a subsample analysis shows weak evidence of a negative link between graduation and manufacturing employment in female-dominated industries, but the link is not robust.

EU GSP; graduation; manufacturing employment; fixed effects; Business and Economics; H2

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