Trade Reforms and the Gender Wage Gap in India

Sohini Paul, National Council of Applied Economic Research
Sourabh Paul, National Council of Applied Economic Research

This paper examines the gender wage diiferential in India from 1983 to 2004-05. We use Oaxaca-Blinder method of decomposition to study the gender wage gap. Moreover, we investigate whether trade liberalisation has any impact on gender wage gap. To be specfic, we investigate whether state level trade exposure has an impact on a) female labour force participation, b) gender wage gap. We estimate the probability of work force participation for female using binary choice model controlling for individual level characteristics and policy variable (region level trade exposure). We also estimate the gender wage gap using various decomposition methods and determine the significance of policy variable (trade exposure). We use household survey data of Indian National Sample Survey (NSS) for wage, employment and other socio-economic information. The tariff data is extracted from UNCTAD - TRAINS (Trade Analysis and Information System) data base.