Gender-Trade Issues: The Effect of AGOA on Female Participation in African Labour Markets

The primal aim of this study is to investigate the effect of the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA) on one of the gendered outcomes; female labour force participation rate (FLFPR) within the Sub-Saharan region. This study adds to the literature by insinuating the provision of new insights about one of the trade policies that were primarily tailored to trade liberalisation among others, but have gender inclusion spill over effects, especially by utilising the pre-and post-AGOA dataset. While utilising a censorious annual data for 33 countries to sort out the before-and-after time periods from a wide span of 1990 to 2019, this study adopted a hybrid model of the Difference-in-Differences (DID) technique and a non-iterative reweighting procedure: Entropy Balancing (EB). Despite improving the external validity by employing a censorious annual data set, the DID technique counters the selection bias since AGOA membership is not random. Furthermore, the EB takes care of the covariates balancing, thereby improving precision by constructing a "statistically" similar control group. The findings reveal that AGOA member countries in the region, unlike other non-member counterparts significantly experience improved female labour force participation rates of about 10.8%. That is, AGOA has a positive effect on FLFPR. This study suggests that policy makers should be inclined to policies that will enable AGOA beneficiary countries to continuously retain their eligibility status. First, improve the rule of law and governance, as a step to combat corruption. Lastly, ensuring that required quotas are met, or at least significant progress is made to reach thereof.