Do Female Workers in Developing Countries Benefit from Labor Provisions in PTAs?

The inclusion of labor provisions in PTAs has become more common in recent years as economies seek to protect labor rights through trade policy. However, as documented in the LABPTA dataset (Raess and Sari, 2018), there is significant variation in the scope and enforceability of these labor provisions across the different PTAs. Building on LABPTA, we extend coverage to include all PTAs signed between 2016 and 2021 and perform a retrospective econometric analysis to determine the effect of PTAs with labor provisions on gender wage gap, a key indicator of gender equality and women’s economic right.