Saturday, February 2, 2008
The Great Depression
in the United States was an economic slowdown, from 1930 to 1939. It was a decade of high unemployment, low profits, low prices on goods, high poverty, and the trade market was brought to a standstill, which consequently affected the world market in the 1930s. Industries that suffered the most were the agriculture, mining, and logging industries. The stock market crash of 1929 was not the sole cause of the Great Depression, but it made recovery after the fact difficult. The depression caused major political changes, the most notable among them being the New Deal, involving large scale federal relief programs, whose aims were to aid the agricultural industry, support labor unions. The formation of the New Deal coalition by Franklin Delano Roosevelt was another notable accomplishment. This national as well as world-wide disaster affected the nation for decades to come, and thus hardened the country's resolution to never let such a catastrophe happen again, instilling the national ideal of having "Freedom from Fear.
Causes
The search for causes is closely connected to the question of how to avoid a future depression. The political and policy viewpoints of scholars are mixed into the analysis of historic events eight decades ago. Current theories may be broadly classified into two main points of view. First, there is orthodox classical economics, monetarist, Keynesian, Austrian Economics and neoclassical economic theory, which focuses on the macroeconomic effects of money supply, including Mass production and consumption. Second, there are structural theories, including those of institutional economics, that point to underconsumption and over-investment (economic bubble), or to malfeasance by bankers and industrialists.
There are multiple issues: what set off the first downturn in 1929, what the structural weaknesses and specific events that turned it into a major depression were, how the downturn spread from country to country, and why the recovery took so long.
In terms of the 1929 downturn, historians emphasize structural factors and the stock market crash, while economists point to Britain's decision to return to the Gold Standard at pre-World War I parities ($4.86 Pound)Although some believe the Wall Street Crash of 1929 was the immediate cause triggering the Great Depression, there are other, deeper causes that explain the crisis. The vast economic cost of World War I weakened the ability of the world to respond to a major crisis.
Economists dispute how much weight to give the stock market crash of October 1929. According to Milton Friedman, "the stock market in 1929 played a role in the initial depression." It clearly changed sentiment about and expectations of the future, shifting the outlook from very positive to negative, with a dampening effect on investment and entrepreneurship, but some feel that an increase in interest rates by the Federal government could have also caused the slow steps into the downturn towards the Great Depression.
The Great Depression was not a sudden collapse. The stock market steadily recovered after the crash of 1929 and recovered to early 1929 levels by the April of 1931. Together, government and business actually spent more in the first half of 1930 than the previous year. However, leery consumers cut back their expenditures by ten percent. Also, a severe drought ravaged the agricultural heartland beginning in the summer of 1930. In the spring of 1931, credit was ample and available at low rates, but people feared for the future and were reluctant to add new debt by borrowing. Auto sales declined below the levels of 1928 only by the end of May 1931. Prices began to decline across the board, but wages held steady until they started down in 193. Conditions were worst in farming areas where commodity prices plunged, and in mining and logging areas where unemployment was high and there were few alternative jobs. The decline in the American economy was the motor that pulled down most other countries at first, then internal weaknesses or strengths in each country made conditions worse or better. By late in 1930, a steady decline set in which reached bottom by March 1933. This produced the greatest long-term market declines by any measure and erased billions in assets.
Macroeconomists, such as Ben Bernanke, have revived the debt-deflation view of the Great Depression originated by Arthur Cecil Pigou and Irving Fisher. In the 1920s, widespread use of the home mortgage and credit purchases of automobiles and furniture in the U.S. boosted spending, but created consumer debt. People who were deeply in debt when a price deflation occurred were in serious trouble — even if they kept their jobs — and risked default. They drastically cut current spending to keep payments on time, thus lowering demand for new products. Furthermore, the debts grew when prices and incomes fell 20-50%, but the debts remained at the same dollar amount. With future profits looking poor, capital investment slowed drastically. In the face of bad loans and worsening future prospects, banks became more conservative in lending money. They built up their capital reserves, which intensified the deflationary pressures. The vicious cycle developed, and the downward spiral accelerated. This kind of self-aggravating process may have turned a 1930 recession into a 1933 depression.
Many economists at the time argued that the sharp decline in international trade after 1930 helped to worsen the depression, especially for countries dependent on foreign trade. Most historians and economists blamed the American Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930 for worsening the depression by reducing international trade and causing retaliation. However, foreign trade was a small part of overall economic activity in the United States; it was a much larger factor in most other countries.The average ad valorem rate of duties on dutiable imports for 1921-1925 was 25.9%, but under the new tariff it jumped to 50% in 1931-1935.
In euros terms, American exports declined from about US$5.2 billion in 1929 to US$1.7 billion in 1933; but prices also fell, so the physical volume of exports only fell by half. Hardest hit were farm commodities such as wheat, cotton, tobacco, and lumber. According to this theory, the collapse of farm exports caused many American farmers to default on their loans leading to the bank runs on small rural banks that characterized the early years of the Great Depression
Monetarists, including Milton Friedman and Ben Bernanke, stress the failure of the American Federal Reserve System to take action as the money supply fell by one-third from 1930 to 1931. With significantly less money to go around, businessmen could not get new loans and could not even get their old loans renewed, forcing many to stop investing. This interpretation says the Federal Reserve might have been able to slow the depression but failed to do so. The Fed was not controlled by President Herbert Hoover or the U.S. Treasury; it was primarily controlled by member banks and businessmen, and it was to these groups that the Fed listened most attentively regarding policies to follow.
In Milton Friedman's work, A Monetary History of the United States, he writes that the downward turn in the economy starting with the stock market crash would have been just another recession. In general, he states the problem was that some bank failures produced widespread runs on banks. He claims that if the Federal Reserve had acted by providing emergency lending to these key banks or simply bought government bonds on the open market to provide liquidity and increase the quantity of money after the key banks fell, all the rest of the banks that fell after the very large and public ones did would not have, the money supply would not have fallen to the extent it did, and would not have fallen at the speed it did. The banks that failed were nearly all small local operations in neighborhoods or small towns. Before 1933, there were no major bank failures in the major cities.
The revolutionary left saw the Great Depression as the beginning of capitalism's final collapse. The idea mobilized the far left for action, but they failed to take power in any major country in the 1929-32 period.
President Franklin D. Roosevelt primarily blamed the excesses of big business for causing an unstable bubble-like economy. He claimed that the problem was that business had too much power, and the New Deal was intended to remedy that by empowering labor unions and farmers (which it did) and by raising taxes on corporate profits. The New Dealers tried to raise taxes and failed. Regulation of the economy was a favorite remedy. Most of the New Deal regulations were abolished or scaled back in 1975-1985 in a bipartisan wave of deregulation. However the Securities and Exchange Commission which regulates Wall Street, won widespread support and continues to operate.
British economist John Maynard Keynes argued that the lower aggregate expenditures in the economy contributed to a multiple decline in income, well below full employment. In this situation, the economy may reach perfect balance, but at a cost of high unemployment. Keynesian economists were increasingly calling for government to take up the slack by increasing government spending.
Economists Harold Cole and Lee Ohanian have emphasized the unusually slow recovery from the Great Depression. After most recessions productivity and output return to their usual upward trend quickly. Although output returned to 1929 levels by 1937, it was well below its usual upward trend, the equivalent of eight years of zero growth. Productivity, by contrast, returned to its usual upward trend by 1936. Good explanations for this slow recovery must explain why labor supply remained well below 1929 levels during the 1930s. Similar studies of other countries find variations in the recovery rate due to different government policies. Cole and Ohanian suggest that business cartelisation and increasing regulation can explain the decline in labor supply.
New Deal
From 1933 onward, President Roosevelt argued a restructuring of the economy would be needed to prevent another or avoid prolonging the current depression. New Deal programs sought to stimulate demand and provide work and relief for the impoverished through increased government spending, by:
Instituting regulations which ended what was called "cut-throat competition," which kept forcing down prices and profits for everyone. (The NRA, which ended in 1935).
Setting minimum prices and wages and competitive conditions in all industries. (NRA)
Encouraging unions that would raise wages, to 93% increase the purchasing power of the working class. (NRA)
Cutting farm production so as to raise prices and make it possible to earn a living in farming (done by the AAA and successor farm programs).
The most controversial aspect of the New Deal agencies was the National Recovery Administration (NRA). It lasted less than a year (1933-34) and ordered:
businesses to work with government to set prices;
the NBA board to set labor codes and standards.
These reforms (together with relief and recover measures) are called by historians the First New Deal. It was centered around the use of an alphabet soup of agencies set up in 1933 and 1934, along with the use of previous agencies such as the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, to regulate and stimulate the economy. By 1935, the "Second New Deal" added social security, a national relief agency (the Works Progress Administration, W.P.A) and, through the National Labor Relations Board, a strong stimulus to the growth of labor unions. Unemployment fell by two-thirds in Roosevelt's first term (from 25% to 9%, 1933 to 1937) but then remained high until 1942.
In 1929, federal expenditures constituted only 3% of the GDP. Between 1933 and 1939, they tripled, funded primarily by a growth in the national debt. The debt as proportion of GNP rose under Hoover from 20% to 40%. Roosevelt kept it at 40% until the war began, when it soared to 128%. After the Recession of 1937, conservatives were able to form a bipartisan conservative coalition to stop further expansion of the New Deal and, by 1943, had abolished all of the relief programs. The New Deal was, and still is, controversial and widely debated. Many think the New Deal helped the American economy at the time, but hurts us today. While others think that the New Deal was a total failure, and still others believe it was an amazing success.
Recession of 1937
Total employment in the United States from 1920 to 1940, excluding farms and WPA
By 1936, all the main economic indicators had regained the levels of the late 1920s, except for unemployment, which remained high. In 1937, the American economy unexpectedly fell, lasting through most of 1938. Production declined sharply, as did profits and employment. Unemployment jumped from 14.3% in 1937 to 19.0% in 1938. The Roosevelt Administration reacted by launching a rhetorical campaign against monopoly power, which was cast as the cause of the depression, and appointing Thurman Arnold to act; Arnold was not effective, and the attack ended once World War II began and corporate energies had to be directed to winning the war. By 1939, the effects of the 1937 recession had disappeared.
Employment in private sector factories recovered to the level of the late 1920s by 1937, but did not grow much bigger until the war came and manufacturing employment leaped from 11 million in 1940 to 18 million in 1943.
Another response to the 1937 deepening of the Great Depression had more tangible results. Ignoring the pleas of the Treasury Department, Roosevelt embarked on an antidote to the depression, reluctantly abandoning his efforts to balance the budget and launching a $5 billion spending program in the spring of 1938, in an effort to increase mass purchasing power. Business-oriented observers explained the recession and recovery in very different terms from the Keynesians. They argued the New Deal had been very hostile to business expansion in 1935–37, had encouraged massive strikes which fiscal stimulus required to end the downturn of the Depression was, and it led, at the time, to fears that as soon as America demobilized, it would return to Depression conditions and industrial output would fall to its pre-war levels. The incorrect Keynesian prediction of a new depression would start after the war failed to take account of pent-up consumer demand as a result of the Depression and World War.
Afterwards:,
Manufacturing employment in the United States from 1920 to 1940
The government began heavy military spending in 1940, and started drafting millions of young men that year; by 1945, 17 million had entered service to their country. But that was not enough to absorb all the unemployed.
During the war, the government subsidized wages through cost-plus contracts. Government contractors were paid in full for their costs, plus a certain percentage profit margin. That meant the more wages a person was paid the higher the company profits since the government would cover them plus a percentage. In 1941-1943, many factories took in unskilled workers and trained them (at government expense). The military itself was a massive training program in technology for most soldiers and sailors.
Structural barriers were lowered during the war, especially informal policies against hiring women, minorities, and workers over 45 or under 18. (See FEPC) Strikes largely ended as unions pushed their members to work harder. Tens of thousands of new factories and shipyards were built, with bus service and nursery care for childrens forecast making them more accessible. Wages soared for workers, making it quite expensive to sit at home. The combination of all these factors drove unemployment below 2% in 1943.
in the United States was an economic slowdown, from 1930 to 1939. It was a decade of high unemployment, low profits, low prices on goods, high poverty, and the trade market was brought to a standstill, which consequently affected the world market in the 1930s. Industries that suffered the most were the agriculture, mining, and logging industries. The stock market crash of 1929 was not the sole cause of the Great Depression, but it made recovery after the fact difficult. The depression caused major political changes, the most notable among them being the New Deal, involving large scale federal relief programs, whose aims were to aid the agricultural industry, support labor unions. The formation of the New Deal coalition by Franklin Delano Roosevelt was another notable accomplishment. This national as well as world-wide disaster affected the nation for decades to come, and thus hardened the country's resolution to never let such a catastrophe happen again, instilling the national ideal of having "Freedom from Fear.
Causes
The search for causes is closely connected to the question of how to avoid a future depression. The political and policy viewpoints of scholars are mixed into the analysis of historic events eight decades ago. Current theories may be broadly classified into two main points of view. First, there is orthodox classical economics, monetarist, Keynesian, Austrian Economics and neoclassical economic theory, which focuses on the macroeconomic effects of money supply, including Mass production and consumption. Second, there are structural theories, including those of institutional economics, that point to underconsumption and over-investment (economic bubble), or to malfeasance by bankers and industrialists.
There are multiple issues: what set off the first downturn in 1929, what the structural weaknesses and specific events that turned it into a major depression were, how the downturn spread from country to country, and why the recovery took so long.
In terms of the 1929 downturn, historians emphasize structural factors and the stock market crash, while economists point to Britain's decision to return to the Gold Standard at pre-World War I parities ($4.86 Pound)Although some believe the Wall Street Crash of 1929 was the immediate cause triggering the Great Depression, there are other, deeper causes that explain the crisis. The vast economic cost of World War I weakened the ability of the world to respond to a major crisis.
Economists dispute how much weight to give the stock market crash of October 1929. According to Milton Friedman, "the stock market in 1929 played a role in the initial depression." It clearly changed sentiment about and expectations of the future, shifting the outlook from very positive to negative, with a dampening effect on investment and entrepreneurship, but some feel that an increase in interest rates by the Federal government could have also caused the slow steps into the downturn towards the Great Depression.
The Great Depression was not a sudden collapse. The stock market steadily recovered after the crash of 1929 and recovered to early 1929 levels by the April of 1931. Together, government and business actually spent more in the first half of 1930 than the previous year. However, leery consumers cut back their expenditures by ten percent. Also, a severe drought ravaged the agricultural heartland beginning in the summer of 1930. In the spring of 1931, credit was ample and available at low rates, but people feared for the future and were reluctant to add new debt by borrowing. Auto sales declined below the levels of 1928 only by the end of May 1931. Prices began to decline across the board, but wages held steady until they started down in 193. Conditions were worst in farming areas where commodity prices plunged, and in mining and logging areas where unemployment was high and there were few alternative jobs. The decline in the American economy was the motor that pulled down most other countries at first, then internal weaknesses or strengths in each country made conditions worse or better. By late in 1930, a steady decline set in which reached bottom by March 1933. This produced the greatest long-term market declines by any measure and erased billions in assets.
Macroeconomists, such as Ben Bernanke, have revived the debt-deflation view of the Great Depression originated by Arthur Cecil Pigou and Irving Fisher. In the 1920s, widespread use of the home mortgage and credit purchases of automobiles and furniture in the U.S. boosted spending, but created consumer debt. People who were deeply in debt when a price deflation occurred were in serious trouble — even if they kept their jobs — and risked default. They drastically cut current spending to keep payments on time, thus lowering demand for new products. Furthermore, the debts grew when prices and incomes fell 20-50%, but the debts remained at the same dollar amount. With future profits looking poor, capital investment slowed drastically. In the face of bad loans and worsening future prospects, banks became more conservative in lending money. They built up their capital reserves, which intensified the deflationary pressures. The vicious cycle developed, and the downward spiral accelerated. This kind of self-aggravating process may have turned a 1930 recession into a 1933 depression.
Many economists at the time argued that the sharp decline in international trade after 1930 helped to worsen the depression, especially for countries dependent on foreign trade. Most historians and economists blamed the American Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930 for worsening the depression by reducing international trade and causing retaliation. However, foreign trade was a small part of overall economic activity in the United States; it was a much larger factor in most other countries.The average ad valorem rate of duties on dutiable imports for 1921-1925 was 25.9%, but under the new tariff it jumped to 50% in 1931-1935.
In euros terms, American exports declined from about US$5.2 billion in 1929 to US$1.7 billion in 1933; but prices also fell, so the physical volume of exports only fell by half. Hardest hit were farm commodities such as wheat, cotton, tobacco, and lumber. According to this theory, the collapse of farm exports caused many American farmers to default on their loans leading to the bank runs on small rural banks that characterized the early years of the Great Depression
Monetarists, including Milton Friedman and Ben Bernanke, stress the failure of the American Federal Reserve System to take action as the money supply fell by one-third from 1930 to 1931. With significantly less money to go around, businessmen could not get new loans and could not even get their old loans renewed, forcing many to stop investing. This interpretation says the Federal Reserve might have been able to slow the depression but failed to do so. The Fed was not controlled by President Herbert Hoover or the U.S. Treasury; it was primarily controlled by member banks and businessmen, and it was to these groups that the Fed listened most attentively regarding policies to follow.
In Milton Friedman's work, A Monetary History of the United States, he writes that the downward turn in the economy starting with the stock market crash would have been just another recession. In general, he states the problem was that some bank failures produced widespread runs on banks. He claims that if the Federal Reserve had acted by providing emergency lending to these key banks or simply bought government bonds on the open market to provide liquidity and increase the quantity of money after the key banks fell, all the rest of the banks that fell after the very large and public ones did would not have, the money supply would not have fallen to the extent it did, and would not have fallen at the speed it did. The banks that failed were nearly all small local operations in neighborhoods or small towns. Before 1933, there were no major bank failures in the major cities.
The revolutionary left saw the Great Depression as the beginning of capitalism's final collapse. The idea mobilized the far left for action, but they failed to take power in any major country in the 1929-32 period.
President Franklin D. Roosevelt primarily blamed the excesses of big business for causing an unstable bubble-like economy. He claimed that the problem was that business had too much power, and the New Deal was intended to remedy that by empowering labor unions and farmers (which it did) and by raising taxes on corporate profits. The New Dealers tried to raise taxes and failed. Regulation of the economy was a favorite remedy. Most of the New Deal regulations were abolished or scaled back in 1975-1985 in a bipartisan wave of deregulation. However the Securities and Exchange Commission which regulates Wall Street, won widespread support and continues to operate.
British economist John Maynard Keynes argued that the lower aggregate expenditures in the economy contributed to a multiple decline in income, well below full employment. In this situation, the economy may reach perfect balance, but at a cost of high unemployment. Keynesian economists were increasingly calling for government to take up the slack by increasing government spending.
Economists Harold Cole and Lee Ohanian have emphasized the unusually slow recovery from the Great Depression. After most recessions productivity and output return to their usual upward trend quickly. Although output returned to 1929 levels by 1937, it was well below its usual upward trend, the equivalent of eight years of zero growth. Productivity, by contrast, returned to its usual upward trend by 1936. Good explanations for this slow recovery must explain why labor supply remained well below 1929 levels during the 1930s. Similar studies of other countries find variations in the recovery rate due to different government policies. Cole and Ohanian suggest that business cartelisation and increasing regulation can explain the decline in labor supply.
New Deal
From 1933 onward, President Roosevelt argued a restructuring of the economy would be needed to prevent another or avoid prolonging the current depression. New Deal programs sought to stimulate demand and provide work and relief for the impoverished through increased government spending, by:
Instituting regulations which ended what was called "cut-throat competition," which kept forcing down prices and profits for everyone. (The NRA, which ended in 1935).
Setting minimum prices and wages and competitive conditions in all industries. (NRA)
Encouraging unions that would raise wages, to 93% increase the purchasing power of the working class. (NRA)
Cutting farm production so as to raise prices and make it possible to earn a living in farming (done by the AAA and successor farm programs).
The most controversial aspect of the New Deal agencies was the National Recovery Administration (NRA). It lasted less than a year (1933-34) and ordered:
businesses to work with government to set prices;
the NBA board to set labor codes and standards.
These reforms (together with relief and recover measures) are called by historians the First New Deal. It was centered around the use of an alphabet soup of agencies set up in 1933 and 1934, along with the use of previous agencies such as the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, to regulate and stimulate the economy. By 1935, the "Second New Deal" added social security, a national relief agency (the Works Progress Administration, W.P.A) and, through the National Labor Relations Board, a strong stimulus to the growth of labor unions. Unemployment fell by two-thirds in Roosevelt's first term (from 25% to 9%, 1933 to 1937) but then remained high until 1942.
In 1929, federal expenditures constituted only 3% of the GDP. Between 1933 and 1939, they tripled, funded primarily by a growth in the national debt. The debt as proportion of GNP rose under Hoover from 20% to 40%. Roosevelt kept it at 40% until the war began, when it soared to 128%. After the Recession of 1937, conservatives were able to form a bipartisan conservative coalition to stop further expansion of the New Deal and, by 1943, had abolished all of the relief programs. The New Deal was, and still is, controversial and widely debated. Many think the New Deal helped the American economy at the time, but hurts us today. While others think that the New Deal was a total failure, and still others believe it was an amazing success.
Recession of 1937
Total employment in the United States from 1920 to 1940, excluding farms and WPA
By 1936, all the main economic indicators had regained the levels of the late 1920s, except for unemployment, which remained high. In 1937, the American economy unexpectedly fell, lasting through most of 1938. Production declined sharply, as did profits and employment. Unemployment jumped from 14.3% in 1937 to 19.0% in 1938. The Roosevelt Administration reacted by launching a rhetorical campaign against monopoly power, which was cast as the cause of the depression, and appointing Thurman Arnold to act; Arnold was not effective, and the attack ended once World War II began and corporate energies had to be directed to winning the war. By 1939, the effects of the 1937 recession had disappeared.
Employment in private sector factories recovered to the level of the late 1920s by 1937, but did not grow much bigger until the war came and manufacturing employment leaped from 11 million in 1940 to 18 million in 1943.
Another response to the 1937 deepening of the Great Depression had more tangible results. Ignoring the pleas of the Treasury Department, Roosevelt embarked on an antidote to the depression, reluctantly abandoning his efforts to balance the budget and launching a $5 billion spending program in the spring of 1938, in an effort to increase mass purchasing power. Business-oriented observers explained the recession and recovery in very different terms from the Keynesians. They argued the New Deal had been very hostile to business expansion in 1935–37, had encouraged massive strikes which fiscal stimulus required to end the downturn of the Depression was, and it led, at the time, to fears that as soon as America demobilized, it would return to Depression conditions and industrial output would fall to its pre-war levels. The incorrect Keynesian prediction of a new depression would start after the war failed to take account of pent-up consumer demand as a result of the Depression and World War.
Afterwards:,
Manufacturing employment in the United States from 1920 to 1940
The government began heavy military spending in 1940, and started drafting millions of young men that year; by 1945, 17 million had entered service to their country. But that was not enough to absorb all the unemployed.
During the war, the government subsidized wages through cost-plus contracts. Government contractors were paid in full for their costs, plus a certain percentage profit margin. That meant the more wages a person was paid the higher the company profits since the government would cover them plus a percentage. In 1941-1943, many factories took in unskilled workers and trained them (at government expense). The military itself was a massive training program in technology for most soldiers and sailors.
Structural barriers were lowered during the war, especially informal policies against hiring women, minorities, and workers over 45 or under 18. (See FEPC) Strikes largely ended as unions pushed their members to work harder. Tens of thousands of new factories and shipyards were built, with bus service and nursery care for childrens forecast making them more accessible. Wages soared for workers, making it quite expensive to sit at home. The combination of all these factors drove unemployment below 2% in 1943.
Friday, January 25, 2008
Introduction
Information Technology (IT) is a driving factor in the process of globalization. Improvements in the early 1990s in computer hardware, software, and telecommunications have caused widespread improvements in access to information and economic potential. These advances have facilitated efficiency gains in all sectors of the economy. IT provides the communication network that facilitates the expansion of products, ideas, and resources among nations and among people regardless of geographic location. Creating efficient and effective channels to exchange information, IT has been the catalyst for global integration.
Information Technology
Recent advances in our ability to communicate and process information in digital form—a series of developments sometimes described as an "IT revolution"—are reshaping the economies and social lives of many countries around the world.
Products based upon or enhanced by information technology are used in nearly every aspect of life in contemporary industrial societies. The spread of IT and its applications has been extraordinarily rapid. Just 20 years ago, for example, the use of desktop personal computers was still limited to a fairly small number of technologically advanced people. The overwhelming majority of people still produced documents with typewriters, which permit no manipulation of text and offer no storage. Fifteen years ago, large and bulky mobile telephones were carried only by a small number of users in just a few U.S. cities. Today, more than half of all Americans use a mobile phone, and in some developing countries, mobile phones are used by more people than the fixed line telephone network.
But perhaps most dramatically, just fifteen years ago, only scientists were using (or had even heard about) the Internet, the World Wide Web was not up and running, and the browsers that help users navigate the Web had not even been invented yet. Today, of course, the Internet and the Web have transformed commerce, creating entirely new ways for retailers and their customers to make transactions, for businesses to manage the flow of production inputs and market products, and for job seekers and job recruiters to find each other.
The news industry also has been dramatically transformed by the emergence of numerous Internet-enabled news-gathering and dissemination outlets. Websites, chat rooms, instant messaging systems, e-mail, electronic bulletin boards and other Internet-based communication systems have made it much easier for people with common interests to find each other, exchange information, and collaborate with each other. Education at all levels is being transformed by communication, education, and presentationl software and by Websites and other sources of information and analysis on the Internet.
Advances in Information Technology: The IT revolution has been driven by the extraordinarily rapid decline in the cost and rapid increase in the processing power of digital technologies. The digital device whose technological advance has perhaps been most crucial to the IT revolution is the microprocessor, the collections of millions of tiny circuits that serve as the "brains" of personal computers and that are being embedded in an ever-expanding number of products, from video games, to cars, to refrigerators. Over the past two decades, the processing power of microprocessors has doubled roughly every six months.
Another set of advances that has been critical to the IT revolution has occurred in fiber optics. Fiber optics technology enables data, including voices captured in digital form, to be converted into tiny pulses of light and then transmitted at high speeds through glass fibers wrapped into large capacity telecommunication cables. Hundreds of thousands of miles of these cables have been installed over the past ten years, boosting the speed and capacity of telecommunications networks.
Advances in microprocessors, fiber optics, and a number of other complementary technologies, such as telecommunications switching devices and memory chips, have dramatically increased the speed, processing capacity, and storage space of computers and dramatically increased the speed and carrying capacity of telecommunications networks.
A key reason why these advances in IT have spread so quickly is that they have progressively reduced the cost of a unit of computing power or the transmission of a message. For less than $1,000, Americans without any advanced technical training can purchase and use a desktop computer whose data processing power far exceeds the room-sized computers that powered the spacecraft that carried astronauts to the moon and back in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
The decline in computing prices has been a factor in spurning the growth of computers in the developing world (see Figure 1). Countries such as China, Russia, Indonesia, India, and Brazil experienced tremendous growth in the number of personal computers. Between 1993-2000 the growth rate of personal computers per capita exceeded 500 percent for each of these nations. Worldwide, the sales of MS-DOS & Windows PC computers grew from six millions units in 1981 to 855 millions units in 2006 (Source Computer Industry Almanac).
The spread of digital technologies also has been spurred by several unique attributes of information, the principal input and product of many IT industries. In contrast to more tangible products, like consumer goods, one person's "consumption" of a piece of information does not necessarily reduce or eliminate the possibility that another person might benefit from the same piece of information.
Furthermore, networks built upon the exchange of information, like the Internet, tend to become more valuable to existing participants as new participants link up with them. Finally, the cost of using digital technologies, such as Internet service providers, decreases as the number of users increases. All of these factors have worked together to promote rapid growth in the demand for and supply of IT products and services. During the second half of the 1990s, as more people bought computers and went online, the average cost of the equipment and services necessary to access the Internet declined.
IMPACT OF TECHNOLOGY.
Industrial Structure and Jobs
Developments in computing and telecommunications technology are changing America's industrial landscape and its workforce. The application of new digital technologies to management, manufacturing, distribution, and services has produced significant and lasting increases in productivity, or output per hour. The new technologies have also created new industries (e.g., Internet access providers) and entirely new kinds of work (e.g., website designers) and boosted other industries. But the new technologies have also shrunk or even eliminated other industries and the jobs associated with them (e.g., electric typewriters).
IT is fundamentally restructuring business practices. IT innovations have increased the efficiency of business operations. New IT-based inventory systems allow businesses to cut costs by delivering or receiving parts for "just-in-time" assembly. By reducing delivery times and inventories, "just-in-time" assembly allows businesses to meet consumer demand more quickly and cheaply.
IT and the use of the Internet have also dramatically transformed exchanges between buyers and sellers. Some Web-based businesses, such as Amazon.com, are using the Internet to sell and arrange for the delivery of large quantities of goods without access to a network of wholesalers and retail stores. "Business-to-business" ("B2B") commerce over the Internet is helping many companies streamline their sourcing of production inputs and sell products or services to other companies. Companies are using the Internet to find other businesses that might want to buy their products or services or sell them products or services. The value of B2B e-commerce exceeds the value of e-commerce between Internet retailers and individual consumers.
Over the past five years there has also been a proliferation of on-line employment marketplaces, which offer new tools for buyers and sellers of labor to link up with each other. Internet-based recruitment services enable employers to post job announcements on the Internet and prospective employees to search job listings or post their resumes.
Global E-commerce surged from $130.2 billion in 1999 to nearly $1.640 billion in 2003. This tenfold increase during a four-year time period highlights the incredible growth potential of e-commerce. Figure three below shows the growth of e-commerce in the U.S. from 1999 to 2006.1 Despite the growth of e-commerce, only eleven percent of all payments in the U.S. are electronic.2
Applications of new IT have boosted U.S. labor productivity, or output per worker. From 1974 to 1990, labor productivity grew by 1.4 percent per year. Between 1991 and 1995, annual productivity growth increased slightly, to 1.5 percent per year. From 1996 to 2005, however, as companies invested heavily in IT equipment, software, and services, annual productivity growth soared from 1.5 percent to 4 percent per year according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics measuring non-farm output per hour. As of November 2007, U.S. productivity growth was 4.9 percent in the non-farm business sector for the third-quarter of 2007.3
Figure 4: Source US Dept. of Labor
Most economists attribute this sustained increase in annual productivity growth to the pairing of labor with new kinds of IT across a broad swath of the U.S. economy. Many economists believe the recent productivity gains will endure for the foreseeable future.
Extraordinary labor productivity growth, coupled with a rapid increase in Internet usage by businesses and individual, has prompted some economists and other analysts to argue that the United States now has a "new economy." According to this view, permanently higher productivity, more versatile and flexible corporations, and a likely reduction in the periodic ups and downs of economic activity, known as the business cycle, characterize the new economy.
One significant implication of the new economy theory, if it is correct, is that the United States will be able to grow at a faster rate than has been the historical norm, without generating price inflation. Among other things, higher, non-inflationary growth would enable further reductions in our unemployment rate.
Financial Markets
A second area in which the impact of information technology has been profound is in financial markets. Financial markets encompass a wide variety of institutions and practices through which lenders and borrowers are able to interact. Lenders include banks and other financial institutions that make loans to individuals (e.g., for house or car purchases) and to institutions (e.g., for expansion or acquisitions).
These lenders are typically compensated for the money they lend through interest payments or, in some cases, an ownership stake in an enterprise. Individual investors who buy corporate stocks and bonds or government bonds are also lenders, and the companies and governments that sell the investors the stock or bonds are borrowers.
The borrowers hope to use the money raised through these transactions for new equipment, new lines of business, or other productive purposes. The investor-lenders receive compensation for their investments through interest earnings, dividends, or an increase in the value of their stock or bond holdings.
Stock markets are perhaps the most familiar institutions in the financial marketplace, but a wide variety of other institutions and investment vehicle, or "instruments" are available to those hoping to earn or raise money. These include bond markets, foreign exchange markets, futures markets and options markets to mention a few. Each of these markets for financial markets has been impacted by the efficiency improvements from IT.
A combination of policy reforms and IT innovations has transformed financial markets over the past two decades. Governments around the world have modified or eliminated regulations that limited innovation and competition in their financial markets. They have also reduced barriers to foreign participation in their markets.
New IT developments have spurred innovation and international expansion in financial markets in three ways:
• By permitting complex domestic and international transactions to be conducted rapidly and securely.
• By enhancing data storage, analysis, and other data-dependent tasks associated with the management of financial institutions.
• By giving market actors of all sizes access to a wide array of information on investment and borrowing opportunities, the performance of companies and financial institutions, economic trends, and policy developments.
Building upon policy reforms and technological developments, private financial firms have over the past two decades created numerous new vehicles, or "instruments," through which people and institutions can lend, invest, or raise money. Reforms and technology have also helped multiply cross-border linkages among national financial markets.
As recently as the 1970s, individual investors, firms, and governments were generally able to invest or raise capital only within their own self-contained, national financial systems. Access to foreign bank loans, stocks, and other financial instruments was available only to the most sophisticated investors.
Closed markets like these are hard to imagine today. Cross-border financial arrangements have become commonplace. A global financial market has emerged, and the volume and value of the transactions it supports is staggering. The total daily value of foreign exchange transactions (exchanges of one national currency for another) has increased from 18.3 billion dollars in 1977 to three trillion dollars in April 2007.
Financial Markets
A second area in which the impact of information technology has been profound is in financial markets. Financial markets encompass a wide variety of institutions and practices through which lenders and borrowers are able to interact. Lenders include banks and other financial institutions that make loans to individuals (e.g., for house or car purchases) and to institutions (e.g., for expansion or acquisitions).
These lenders are typically compensated for the money they lend through interest payments or, in some cases, an ownership stake in an enterprise. Individual investors who buy corporate stocks and bonds or government bonds are also lenders, and the companies and governments that sell the investors the stock or bonds are borrowers.
The borrowers hope to use the money raised through these transactions for new equipment, new lines of business, or other productive purposes. The investor-lenders receive compensation for their investments through interest earnings, dividends, or an increase in the value of their stock or bond holdings.
Stock markets are perhaps the most familiar institutions in the financial marketplace, but a wide variety of other institutions and investment vehicle, or "instruments" are available to those hoping to earn or raise money. These include bond markets, foreign exchange markets, futures markets and options markets to mention a few. Each of these markets for financial markets has been impacted by the efficiency improvements from IT.
A combination of policy reforms and IT innovations has transformed financial markets over the past two decades. Governments around the world have modified or eliminated regulations that limited innovation and competition in their financial markets. They have also reduced barriers to foreign participation in their markets.
New IT developments have spurred innovation and international expansion in financial markets in three ways:
• By permitting complex domestic and international transactions to be conducted rapidly and securely.
• By enhancing data storage, analysis, and other data-dependent tasks associated with the management of financial institutions.
• By giving market actors of all sizes access to a wide array of information on investment and borrowing opportunities, the performance of companies and financial institutions, economic trends, and policy developments.
Building upon policy reforms and technological developments, private financial firms have over the past two decades created numerous new vehicles, or "instruments," through which people and institutions can lend, invest, or raise money. Reforms and technology have also helped multiply cross-border linkages among national financial markets.
As recently as the 1970s, individual investors, firms, and governments were generally able to invest or raise capital only within their own self-contained, national financial systems. Access to foreign bank loans, stocks, and other financial instruments was available only to the most sophisticated investors.
Closed markets like these are hard to imagine today. Cross-border financial arrangements have become commonplace. A global financial market has emerged, and the volume and value of the transactions it supports is staggering. The total daily value of foreign exchange transactions (exchanges of one national currency for another) has increased from 18.3 billion dollars in 1977 to three trillion dollars in April 2007.
Benefits
The global financial market built with IT offers an extraordinary range of opportunities to invest and borrow money, benefiting investors, firms, and economies. On the borrowing side, if a U.S. entrepreneur is not satisfied with her American options for raising funds for a new business, she can seek funds in Europe or Japan. The wider range of options available to borrowers like these has increased competition among lenders, helping to keep the cost of borrowing down. This has made it easier for firms to finance business expansion plans and acquisitions, generating jobs and economic growth.
Likewise, on the investing side, a European stock investor hoping to earn a higher return than he can earn in his home stock market can now explore alternative investments in the United States. Access to a wider range of international opportunities has helped successful investors increase their earnings and minimize risk through diversification of their investment portfolios.
The global financial market has increased the growth potential of individual countries. By opening up their financial sectors to international flows of capital, countries have been able to acquire the funds they need to support all sorts of private and public sector development initiatives. These funds have the potential to spur higher levels of growth.
Improving Sectors of Society: Health, Education, and Government
The information revolution is creating opportunities in many other sectors of society, including three that are fundamentally important to the quality of people's lives everywhere: health care, education, and government. Over the past decade, new applications of information and communication technology have improved services, transparency, and public access in each of these areas.
By improving access to health care and education, and by improving the delivery of government services, new IT has the potential to help people around the world overcome geographic or income barriers that have degraded the quality of their lives. By dramatically increasing access to information, the technologies can enhance knowledge, break down barriers to participation, and improve the accountability of public institutions to people. These developments will be especially beneficial to people in poor and underserved communities around the world.
But the great promise of these technologies to improve the quality of lives carries with it an implicit risk: that gaps in technological access will reinforce and perhaps even widen existing gaps in living standards. Access to the promising things that information technology can provide requires access to the technology itself—not just the hardware, but the software and the knowledge necessary to make the hardware work.
There is already alarming evidence that access to IT varies widely from community to community and from country to country. These wide variations in access to IT could lead to the exclusion of large numbers of people from the benefits of the knowledge economy.
In this section we look at some of the ways that IT is enhancing knowledge in health care, education, and government. In the next section we look at gaps in access to IT, sometimes known as the "digital divide."
Health Care
IT is dramatically improving health care in the following ways:
• prevention and control of emerging infectious diseases,
• patient to health care provider interaction,
• rapid dissemination of information,
• and improved responses to outbreak situations.
Efforts to contain outbreaks of dangerous infectious diseases require the rapid collection and transmission of detailed patient data to medical labs or public health centers. Health professionals need tools to communicate important scientific or epidemiological findings to other parts of the health care community. IT is enhancing capacity in each of these areas.
Many health problems in developing countries are being addressed using IT. Digital records and images utilizing digital cameras have made it possible for doctors around the world to share information or offer advice on treatments for complicated ailments. For example, using Internet connections, doctors working in remote regions of northern Uganda during an outbreak of the deadly Ebola virus would be able rapidly to transmit their findings to experts at the World Health Organization in Geneva and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta.
Before the arrival of the Internet, transferring detailed patient information of this kind could take as long as two weeks. In conditions like these, when the rapid dissemination of information is vital to treating infected persons and containing an outbreak, IT can provide tools for an efficient outbreak response.
Public health officials are also using new technologies to study the impact of health interventions and to target disease prevention programs. For example, health agencies have used satellite-based global positioning systems (GPS) to monitor the spread of West Nile Virus in the United States. Data collection and monitoring technologies like these increase the information available to public health officials when they make important health policy decisions.
Information Technology Applications in Health and Medicine
• Patients will have access to their medical records from any location via secured Internet sites. Readily available medical records will help ensure that individuals receive appropriate care when traveling or changing medical institutions.
• New devices are able to determine the chemical content of blood when placed on top of the skin.
• A simple digital watch can be incorporated into a pill bottle-cap to record the time and date when the bottle was opened. This will allow medical personnel to monitor the use of medication by patients.
Education
IT improves educational opportunities by enabling educators and students to overcome barriers of distance and by enhancing the content of instructional materials.
The use of IT to deliver lessons or training from instructors in one location to students in another is frequently called "distance learning." Distance learning has been around for a long time. For many years people have listened to recordings of classroom lectures or other educational presentations, and millions of people have watched educational programming on public televisions channels.
But the emergence of the Internet and developments in educational software has vastly enhanced distance education over the past decade. The geographic reach of distance education has been extended. There has been a substantial increase in the quantity and diversity of educational material available over the Internet or through the use of satellite video and audio linkups.
Over the past decade, computers and Internet connections have been widely deployed in classrooms, from pre-K through the university level. Lessons delivered through computers can be interactive, which gives students real-time feedback on their work and enables them to work at their own pace. Kids love working with computers, so when they are intelligently integrated into classrooms, computers can create excitement about learning among students.
The Internet provides an extraordinary opportunity for students to extend the reach of their learning. Before the Internet, the resources available to students were largely those that could be found in their classrooms or in public libraries. The Internet enables students to reach well beyond the physical confines of their classrooms and gain access to virtually unlimited quantities of information on the topics or events they are discussing in their classrooms. The use of the Internet for school assignments also encourages students to give free rein to their curiosity, and strengthens their research and investigative skills.
IT offers especially valuable educational opportunities for poor people in developing countries. Students and other residents of poor countries are increasingly using the Internet—often in community Internet centers—to gain access to information and communicate via e-mail. Doctors, scientists, and other professionals, for example, can achieve cheap or free access to journals and other professional publications that are too expensive to afford in hard-copy versions.
Government aid agencies, foundations, and private firms are sponsoring numerous distance education programs designed to teach skills to a wide variety of developing country professionals, government officials, engineers, scientists, and businesspeople. Internet or satellite connections enable students from developing countries to take courses offered in foreign institutions. In these and other ways, technology-enabled educational programs can help strengthen the people who will be called upon to provide leadership in developing countries in a wide variety of social welfare, economic, and political fields.
Government
IT can enhance interactions between citizens and their governments in several ways. The use of IT in government, sometimes called "e-government," can enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of government services. E-government can also help achieve other important goals of good governance, such as accountability and transparency.
In democratic societies, information on government activities should be readily available for review by the public. Prior to the emergence of computer databases, the Internet, and other IT innovations, large quantities of government documents were not easily accessible to most citizens. Using these technologies, governments today can provide citizens with fast and free access to a wide variety of documents and records.
Access to official information is critical to ensuring that governments are accountable to citizens—that they are responsive to citizens and that they are doing what they are obligated to do under law. The capacity to track government budget expenditures, for example, enables taxpayers to ensure that governments are trustworthy stewards of the funds entrusted to them.
IT can also provide mechanisms through which governments can interact with citizens. Government websites can provide quick access to information on building regulations, motor vehicle licenses, or immunizations, for example. Information technology can also improve the performance and efficiency of government bureaucracies, and enhance interagency cooperation. In these ways, technology can strengthen the delivery of government services. For example, in India, an e-governance initiative is being implemented to improve citizen access to public services and increase the transparency of government transactions.
Introduction
The current wave of globalization has greatly improved the lives of women worldwide, particularly in the developing world. Nevertheless, women remain disadvantaged in many areas of life. For example, the Center for Global Development estimates that 43 million primary age girls are not enrolled in school. In only 18 countries in the world do women hold even one-third of seats in the legislature. Five hundred thousand women die in pregnancy or childbirth each year. An African woman, for instance, faces a 1 in 16 chance of dying in childbirth in her lifetime, while in the industrialized world, the chance is 1 in 2,800.
The UN’s Millennium Development Goals therefore prioritize gender equality and empowerment of women. As part of the Millennium Goals, the international community, especially the UN, will monitor indicators of gender equality such as levels of female enrollment at school, participation in the workplace, and representation in decision-making positions.
Two key international declarations form the basis for this agenda. As part of its “Decade for Women,” the UN published the Nairobi Forward-Looking Strategies for the Advancement of Women in 1985 with the purpose of creating a blueprint for global action to achieve women’s equality by the year 2000. Ten years later, the Fourth World Conference on Women, held in Beijing in 1995 issued the Beijing Platform for Action aimed to update and invigorate the world community’s commitment to gender equality.
These international conferences and documents have served to crystallize the understanding of the unique problems women face worldwide and to promote efforts to address them. More recently, means to monitor the progress of both have been implemented. Other, similar documents deal with specific challenges to women’s rights. For example, the Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women guarantees women equal rights with men in all spheres of life, including education, employment, health care, suffrage, nationality, and marriage.
This Issue Brief will examine the effects of globalization on women worldwide, namely on their participation in the economy, representation in the political process, education, health, and sexual slavery. It also will discuss perhaps globalization’s greatest benefits to women in the internationalization of the movement for gender equality, and the legal structure that supports this goal and recognizes women’s rights as basic human rights.
Participation in the Economy
The International Monetary Fund and the World Bank encourage developing countries to use export-led growth to expand their economies. Such globalized economies require a labor force of a size that must include women, but women’s employment varies greatly by region. For example, 74 percent of women are in the work force in East Asia, the greatest proportion among all regions of the world, and they participate for the longest part of their lives in comparison to other regions. In the Middle East and North Africa, however, only about 34 percent participate.
Similarly, South American women participate in the labor force more as they age, indicating that they must contribute more income as their household grows following marriage, while women in the Middle East and North Africa drop out of the labor force in great numbers when they marry and have children.
What accounts for these differences? In many cases, cultural barriers, especially in the relationship between women and men within households, impede increased economic participation, or undermine the quality of that participation. For example, even women who do work face differential treatment such as wage gaps and segregation into traditionally female industries. Women have historically borne the burden of non-monetized labor, such as child care and domestic work.
Globalization is changing these norms. The new global developing economies demand women in the monetized as well as non-monetized sectors of work. In fact, globalization has the potential to improve women’s economic achievement. For example, increased employment opportunities for women in non-traditional sectors might enable them to earn and control income, giving a source of empowerment and enhancing women’s capacity to negotiate their role and status within the household and society.
Furthermore, according to the World Bank’s report Enhancing Women’s Participation in Economic Development, women’s economic development will benefit their households and society as a whole: “International experience has proved that support for a stronger role for women in society contributes to economic growth through improved child survival rates, better family health, and reduced fertility rates.”
Increased participation in the work force also implies increased hazards for women, however. Women’s jobs outside the home tend to be the worst compensated, least secure, and most dangerous available in the economy, especially in this period of recession in most developing countries. For example, gaps in labor laws, or ignorance and lack of enforcement of the labor codes in practice, allow for the exploitation of women. In Guatemala, women constitute 80 percent of the textile factory sector, and thousands of mostly indigenous women provide services as domestic servants. In both sectors, women have only a precarious claim on the rights to Guatemala’s legally mandated minimum wage, work-week length, leave time, health care under the national social security system, and privacy protections. Often, they are subject to physical and/or sexual abuse, according to Human Rights Watch.
Unfortunately, even the global nature of business does not confer universal rights for these women. Many U.S.-based companies, such as Target, The Limited, Wal-Mart, GEAR for Sports, Liz Claiborne, and Lee Jeans, have contracts with Guatemalan factories and continue to honor them even if the factories break explicit company policy, such as physically examining women to determine if they are pregnant and denying health care to employees. According to Human Rights Watch, strengthening legal protection for women laborers and increasing their access to legal recourse might cement increased participation in the work as a positive development for women.
Still, while globalization may have increased women’s vulnerability and dependency, there is hope that prioritizing women’s issues has yielded progress and will continue to do so. As the UN has stated, “Women have entered the labor force in unprecedented numbers, increasing the potential for their ability to participate in economic decision making at various levels, starting with the household.”
Representation in the Political Process
While the goal of gender equality has been lauded in many international agreements, including the Millennium Development Goals, many governments lack meaningful participation by women. Increased representation of women in governmental institutions and decision-making bodies is crucial for the overall empowerment of women, especially their inclusion in decision making about issues besides those that are traditionally known as “women’s issues,” such as child and elder care and reproductive health. The 1995 Beijing Fourth World Conference on Women recommended many programs for this purpose, but recent data indicate that the process has been slow and has achieved uneven results worldwide.
The Beijing Conference recommended calling upon the international community and civil society, including non-governmental organizations and the private sector, to take strategic action to reduce inequality between men and women in the sharing of power and decision making at all levels. Following this conference, in 1996, the UN Economic and Social Council requested that the UN Division for the Advancement of Women (DESA) conduct a survey to gather sex-disaggregated data on the composition of national governmental institutions to start the research and build a statistical database on the role of women in government, which were gathered from 187 countries revealed telling information.
For instance, the number of female, government ministers worldwide doubled in the last decade, from 3.4 percent in 1987 to 6.8 percent in 1996. While this seems to indicate that women are gaining positions and increasing their stature in government, the overall picture is mixed, and the statistic masks the disparity between countries. For example, Finland and Sweden have a total of 30 percent of women at the ministerial level and several countries such as Austria, Denmark, Ireland, Netherlands, and Norway have 20-29 percent at that level. But all other countries had less than 20 percent women at the ministerial level.
Additionally, this data reveals that women ministers were predominately concentrated in social areas compared with legal, economic, or political areas. It is important to note as well that these statistics were gathered after the completion of the 1995 Beijing Fourth World Conference on Women, where 189 governments committed themselves to take steps to achieve the goal of achieving democracy through equal representation.
Recently, a new report from the United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM) has supported the findings of the 1996 DESA study. UNIFEM’s report, Progress of the World’s Women 2002: Volume: Gender Equality and the Millennium Development Goals, is the second of a biennial publication that tracks and measures the global commitment to gender equality. The report points out that many international conferences have agreed to the target of reaching 30 percent representation of women in government, and there were definite signs of progress in all regions between 2000 and 2002 towards meeting this goal.
In 2006, women still only account for 16.3 percent of all members in parliaments, a statistic that is not much improved from the 1996 numbers. The increases in parliamentary seats that have been gained by women were attributed mainly to political measures such as quotas that were adopted on a voluntary basis. There are 77-countries that have set quotas for women’s political participation. All of the 18 countries that have reached the 30 percent mark in 2006—Rwanda, Sweden, Costa Rica, Finland, Norway, Denmark, the Netherlands, Cuba, Spain, Argentina, Mozambique, Belgium, Austria, Iceland, South Africa, New Zealand, Germany, Burundi, and Tanzania—implemented quotas.1
Building on the idea that segments of the population will be best served when they are represented in decision-making bodies, the World Economic Forum created the Women Leaders Initiative (WEF) in 2002 to increase the participation of women in the global economy by increasing their representation by women leaders at global summits. WEF said it hoped to “foster leadership and integrate women into a global dialogue and reinforce efforts to identify, inspire and encourage women to work together.”
There are more dimensions to increasing women’s representation, however, than simply seats available to them. First, the UN admits that it is difficult to produce global estimates of the degree to which women’s positions in public leadership have been increased, and that any quantitative study cannot cover the breadth of women’s involvement in decision making. Secondly, securing parliamentary seats through quotas does not mean that the women who assume these positions are fully prepared for them or are aware that gaining a seat is only the first part of a long process of securing women’s equality.
The case of women’s representation in the new Bulgarian parliament is a good example of this problem. Initially, the representation of women in the Bulgarian parliament was credited to the active campaigning by women’s non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and the liberal politics of the new political party, the National Movement for Simeon II (NMSII) (a party that called for the return of the monarchy) that won 43 percent of the seats in the 2001 parliamentary election. The Bulgarian Gender Research Foundation (BGRF) and the Women’s Alliance for Development campaigned for more women in parliament through rallies and organized meetings with parliamentarians of all the parties.
During the elections in 2001, the NMSII campaign accepted the movement’s position and placed women in 40 percent of eligible positions, after the elections in which women secured 26.2 percent of the vote. After the election, however, a BGRF study “found that women in parliament were not fully prepared for their careers. They did not see themselves representing women’s interests, nor did they see themselves as having common interests with each other. NGOs will need to continue to work with the new women parliamentarians to bring women’s issues higher up on their agendas.”
Education
Two-thirds of the world’s children who are not enrolled in school and two-thirds of the world’s illiterate are female. The UN Millennium Development Goal to promote gender equality and empower women therefore uses education as its target and gender disparity in education as its indicator of progress. Through the efforts of the international community, the UN hopes to eliminate gender disparity in primary and secondary education, preferably by 2005, and in all levels of education no later than 2015.
Education is crucial because, according to United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), inequality in education is highly correlated to poverty, and its elimination would help alleviate poverty in general. In addition, UNESCO says that female education has spillover effects for society, including improved fertility rates, household and child health, and educational opportunities for the rest of the household. In addition, increased skill level allows women to participate more in the economy, and increase the economic prosperity of the family.
To address the failure to provide basic education for all, which is defined as a basic human right in the Universal Declaration on Human Rights, the World Education Forum (WEF) produced the Education For All targets, which include ending inequality between males and females in education. The Forum recommended that governments and organizations implement integrated strategies for gender equality in education that recognize the need for changes in attitudes, values, and practices.
While some improvements have been made in educating girls in the developing world, particularly in the Middle East and North Africa where the education systems benefit from oil revenues and women now constitute up to 63 percent of university students, gender gaps in enrollment remain pronounced. In some countries, the gap is widening despite the specific recent international focus. It is notable that in the developed world females slightly outnumber males in school, while in the developing world the gap averages eight percentage points. Between 1980 and 1998, the gender gap increased in two regions: Eastern Europe and Sub Saharan Africa. In addition, the lessening gap apparent in other regions, such as South America, may be due to smaller enrollment of boys instead of greater enrollment of girls.
Several of the world’s poorest countries, in Sub Saharan Africa, west Asia, and the Arab states, will fail to reach Education For All targets, especially gender parity, by the agreed date of 2005. UNESCO’s monitoring team found that norms and values hold females back as much or more than policy. The education of girls is not valued in many societies because they are expected to contribute more at home, while boys should gain skills to work outside the home.
There exist region-specific hazards for girls as well. For example, in South America, the further a school is from a household, the less likely girls are to attend, because travel introduces an increased risk of assault and rape. In parts of the Middle East and North Africa, the public life of a female is so limited that exposure to anything outside the home seems unnecessary.
A World Bank study found that incentive-based enrollment programs can overcome even deeply imbedded cultural resistance. For example, when girls in Bangladesh were offered a small salary for attending and passing school, community protests subsided, or parents affected change, on issues such as female students taught by men and constructing separate latrines for males and females.
Health
Everyone in the developing world remains more susceptible to poor health because of lack of services, or lack of access to services, and a lack of education and information about health issues. Women have additional vulnerabilities, especially malnutrition, sexually transmitted diseases, pregnancy complications, cervical and breast cancer, domestic violence, sexual abuse, and genital mutilation. In many cultures, women are the first to take care of the vulnerable, sick, and dying and the last to receive preventative or life saving treatment.
To alleviate these problems, the World Bank’s emphasizes public education programs that promote healthy lifestyles, eliminate gender discrimination in education and access to services, and prioritize the help for young girls “since adolescence is the stage at which the intergenerational cycle of early pregnancy, poor health and nutrition, and poverty can be broken.” According to the Bank, investments that improve women’s health and nutrition are justified on both economic and humanitarian grounds, because they serve to alleviate poverty and develop human resources.
Maternal health is one of the most important elements in these efforts. The Millennium Development Goals have charged the UN Children’s Education Fund (UNICEF) and the World Health Organization (WHO) with promoting and monitoring a reduction in maternal mortality by three quarters between 1990 and 2015. Sub-Saharan Africa has the largest problem with maternal mortality, with 1,100 maternal deaths per 100,000 live births, a figure more than twice as high as in any other region.
Reasons for maternal mortality include delays in seeking medical help, transporting pregnant women to health centers, and receiving medical assistance, and may be attributable to social, cultural, religious, and economic factors. For example, a woman may not alter her lifestyle or workload inside and outside the home, because she cannot afford to and because the expectant father does not alter his, burdening her physically and leaving no time for medical attention, which often requires time and travel to obtain.
A sensitive issue for women’s global health is the role of reproductive rights. The Platform for Action takes a definitive stance in defense of such rights, including abortion. Empirical evidence shows that, in all world regions, household size contributes directly to poverty and to the workload borne by women. The percentage of poor women decreases with a corresponding decrease in fertility rate. In addition to being a cause of higher welfare for women, lower fertility rates are also shown to be an effect of other positive indicators of development, especially higher education rates and well-functioning markets for labor and credit.
Thus, a woman may want to plan or even terminate a pregnancy, requiring access to birth control and abortion, and information about these options. The Platform for Action calls a well-informed decision on family planning the right of every woman. Unsafe abortions are also a threat to women’s health. WHO estimates that 13 percent of maternal deaths are caused by unsafe abortions, and that 20 million of the 40 to 60 million abortions performed each year in the world are unsafe with negative consequences for women’s health.
Nevertheless, these issues remain controversial, especially in traditional or religious societies, such as Catholic and Muslim countries. At the Beijing Conference, and in the years that followed, the Vatican, Central American countries, and some Muslim countries such as Egypt, opposed the Platform for Action, insisting that information about sexual and reproductive issues should be given to parents to relay to their children, rather than directly to adolescents. They also oppose abortion rights, which the Platform for Action recognizes as a health issue for women.
Another problem is the HIV/AIDS virus, especially in Sub Saharan Africa and South East Asia, which has grown into an epidemic that affects women more adversely than men, because they are less well educated about it and less well protected from it. Women are twice as likely as men to be infected with HIV/AIDS, and in some areas young women are up to six times more likely than men to become infected.
UNIFEM has tried to counter the feminization of infection by promoting gender equality: “Gender inequality is fuelling the rapid spread of HIV with women divested of control over their lives and their bodies. Many women and girls are not in a position to say no to unwanted sex, nor can they negotiate condom use.” In addition to elevated biological vulnerabilities and cultural restraints on their sexual empowerment, women are at increased risk for contracting HIV for economic reasons: “Financial or material dependence on men means that women cannot control when, with whom and in what circumstances they have sex; many women have to exchange sex for material favors, for daily survival.” WHO has in response declared that women have a right to sexuality that does not endanger their lives and uses this principle to guide their work to prevent HIV/AIDSs.
Finally, some traditional cultural practices impose threats to the health of women, and may be more difficult to change through educational and preventative policies than unhealthy practices that are unrelated to culture, such as nutrition. The UN Human Rights Commission identifies the practices most threatening to women as:
• female circumcision, known as female genital mutilation to its opponents, which involves the excision of a woman’s external sexual organs;
• other forms of mutilation, such as facial scarring;
• various nutritional taboos;
• traditional practices associated with childbirth;
• the problem of dowries in some parts of the world;
• honor killing;
• and the consequences of preference for male babies, such as parental neglect and infanticide of female babies.
Several UN agencies and other international bodies, especially the WHO are actively engaged in efforts to eliminate such practices when they affect the health of women and the female children.
Female genital mutilation is a special focus of many efforts to end violence against women, although the movement to view it as a violation of human rights meets some resistance to what some consider a violation of family and community sanctity.
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), the cornerstone of the human rights system, asserts that all human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. It protects the right to security of person and the right not to be subjected to cruel inhuman or degrading treatment — rights which are of direct relevance to the practice of female genital mutilation. The traditional interpretation of these rights has generally failed to encompass forms of violence against women such as domestic violence or female genital mutilation. This arises from a common misconception that states are not responsible for human rights abuses committed within the home or the community.
Human rights campaigns have managed to raise awareness worldwide and promote more specific interpretations of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights that affirm that female genital mutilation, along with other forms of violence against women and harmful traditional practices, is an assault on the dignity, equality, and bodily integrity of women and an affront to human rights.
Modern Day Slavery
The International Labour Organization estimates that there are 2.45 million trafficking victims who are living in exploitive conditions and another 1.2 million people who are trafficked across and within borders. The U.S. State Department estimate 600,000 to 800,000 people trafficked across borders and between 18,000–20,000 of those are trafficked into the United States. These numbers include men, women, and children who are trafficked into forced labor or sexual exploitation, and appear to be on the rise worldwide. Globalization has provided for an easier means of exploiting those living in poverty who are seeking better lives, it also has provided for dramatic improvements in transportation and communications with which to facilitate the physical processing of persons.
The State Department report indicates that women are generally lured into slavery through promises of employment as shopkeepers, maids, nannies, or waitresses in developed countries. Upon arriving these women are then told they have been purchased by someone and must work as a prostitute to repay the enormous debt they suddenly owe. To ensure that these women do not flee, their "owners" often subject them to beatings, take their documents upon arrival, and keep them under conditions of slavery. These women then either physically cannot go to the authorities or are fearful of being deported, especially if the document do not have their documents or they were fraudulently obtained through their trafficker.
One of the main contributing factors to this increase in trafficking has been the widespread subjugation of women. Often ethnic minorities or lower class groups are more vulnerable to trafficking, because these women and girls have a very low social status that puts them at risk. Another contributor to the increase in trafficking is political and economic crisis in conflict or post-conflict areas. The breakdown of society and the rule of law have made these displaced populations vulnerable to the lure of a better future or an exit out of their current countries.
Trafficking flourishes because it is lucrative, generating $7-12 billion a year. In addition, the highly clandestine nature of the crime of human trafficking ensures that the great majority of human trafficking cases goes unreported and culprits remain at large. There are reports that many human traffickers are associated with international criminal organizations and are, therefore, highly mobile and difficult to prosecute. Further complicating matters, sometimes members of the local law enforcement agencies are involved in trafficking. Prosecution is made difficult because victims of trafficking do not testify against traffickers out of fear for their and their family members' lives.
According to Family Health International (1999), programs in Asia have started to publicly address the causes of trafficking in women in the area. For instance, Thailand focused on the source of demand for trafficked services, such as the clients of underage sex workers. Through the impetus and lobbying of the National Commission on Women's Affairs (NCWA), Thailand is the first country in the region to pass laws that impose greater penalties on customers than on sellers for involvement in commercial sex with underage partners. While the law has not been applied widely, it provides a possible framework or model for further legislation and enforcement in other countries.
South-East Asia and South Asia are considered to be home to the largest number of internationally trafficked persons, with estimates of 225,000 and 150,000 victims respectively. Several NGOs are also involved in awareness campaigns to draw attention to the causes of trafficking in women; specifically, the NCWA tries to change male sexual norms through a national poster campaign with messages showing a child saying "my father does not visit prostitutes." A Thai NGO called Development and Education Program for Daughters and Communities aims to prevent women and children from being forced into the illegal sex trade or child labor due to outside pressures, lack of education, and limited employment alternatives. The NGO uses a mix of strategies to convince parents about the dangers of the illegal sex trade. Information about HIV and AIDS, brothel conditions, legal penalties, and potential dangers is used to support their arguments.
Perhaps most importantly, the U.S. government has prioritized trafficking as a law-enforcement issue. The United States enacted the Trafficking Victims Protection Act of 2000, which strengthens pre-existing criminal penalties in other related laws, affords new protections to trafficking victims and makes available certain benefits and services to victims of severe forms of trafficking. Under this law, one option that is available to some victims who assist in the prosecution of their traffickers is the "T-Visa" that allows the victim to remain in the United States of America.
President Bush took up the issue, calling it a humanitarian crisis, in an address to the UN in 2003. “Each year, an estimated 800,000 to 900,000 human beings are bought, sold or forced across the world's borders. Among them are hundreds of thousands of teenage girls, and others as young as five, who fall victim to the sex trade. This commerce in human life generates billions of dollars each year—much of which is used to finance organized crime.”
Under the U.S. PROTECT Act, it is now illegal for an American to travel abroad, or for a foreigner to enter the U.S., for the purpose of sex tourism involving children. The Trafficking Victims Protection Act allows the U.S. to use sanctions to discourage trafficking. In addition, NGO- and government-led campaigns such as the UN’s Global Campaign Against Human Trafficking warn millions of potential victims about the dangers of trafficking.
Conclusion
Globalization offers women unprecedented opportunities, but equally new and unique challenges. Gender inequality springs from many sources, and it is often difficult to determine which forms of inequality are being eliminated by the effects of globalization, and which are exacerbated. Work toward eliminating gender inequality in the framework provided by the Beijing Platform for Action has created awareness, monitoring, and alleviation of the externalities that the new global system creates for women.
Progress toward eliminating gender inequality in the future depends on finding and embracing the occasions, mostly in the political and legal realm, where the global approach strengthens women’s security and welfare, and fighting the issues, mostly in the economic realm, where women are made worse off by the new global system.
Violence Against Women – Global War on a Global Issue
Published On: 12-13-2006
Related Issue Briefs:
| Women and Globalization | International Law and Organizations | Human Rights |
Darfur
A recent media report1 told the story of Aziza, a 17-year old girl in a refugee camp of victims displaced by the Darfur conflict in Sudan. Aziza was gathering firewood outside her camp one day in October when three armed men on horseback caught her and subjected her to rape. One of the men, an Arab and wearing a Sudanese uniform, said to her, “You are black. You have no place here. We will push you out of here. This land will remain for us.”2
Similar incidents are occurring regularly in Darfur. Human Rights Watch estimates that there have been thousands of rape victims in the Darfur conflict since 2003.3 In 2005, the non-governmental organization Médecins Sans Frontières/Doctors Without Borders (MSF) published a briefing paper titled “The Crushing Burden of Rape: Sexual Violence in Darfur,” with numerous accounts from its interactions with the victims in Darfur.
According to one account, the Janjaweed, Arab militia supported by the Sudanese government, are using rape to produce “lighter-skinned Arab babies” in the ethnic-cleansing of African ethnic groups in Darfur.4 In recent months, there has been an alarming increase in the number of reported incidents.5
As these reports continue to come out of Darfur, November 25, 2006 was recognized throughout the world as the International Day for the Elimination of Violence of Women. Since its official designation as such by the UN General Assembly in 1999, it has been a day when governments, international organizations, and NGOs have raised public awareness about gender-based violence.
This day marks the first of “16 Days of Activism against Gender Violence,” an annual international campaign to promote awareness of policies for the elimination of violence against women. Thousands of organizations in 130 countries participate in the campaign whose end coincides each year with International Human Rights Day on Dec 10.6
One notable event that occurred during these16 days in 2006 was the recommitment by 22 African governments to work collectively through the African Union (AU) to eliminate violence against women.7 Numerous conflicts like Darfur, and the resulting treatment of women and girls in them, highlight the extensive degree of gender-based violence on the African continent.8 Rape is contributing to the rampant spread of HIV in Sub-Saharan Africa.
A Human Rights Issue
Violence against women emerged as an international issue during the Decade of Women (1975 – 1985). During that decade, the international community created a set of international norms and standards as well as mechanisms for monitoring the reporting of advancements in women’s rights. The establishment in 1981 of the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), often described as an international bill of rights for women, led to the UN Declaration on the Elimination of Violence Against Women.
This Declaration explicitly defined gender-based violence as a human rights issue. The result of this definition is to bind the issue of violence against women to state responsibility, holding each nation accountable for the violations. Although less than half of the UN member states have legislation concerning gender-based violence, a significant number of countries have recently enacted such laws. As of 2006, 89 out of the 192 UN member states now have legislation against gender-based violence, an increase from 45 states in 2003.9
The International Court Tribunals for former Yugoslavia and for Rwanda, and the Special Court for Sierra Leone helped establish precedent in holding individuals accountable for violence against women during armed conflicts. The 1998 Rome Statute that established the International Criminal Court (ICC) includes gender-based crimes.10
Crimes against humanity now include violent acts against women—rape, sexual slavery, enforced prostitution, forced pregnancy, and enforced sterilization. Any use of rape for ethnic cleansing in Darfur would constitute a crime of genocide under the Geneva conventions.11
In certain countries, however, government laws actually foster violence against women by making it essentially impossible for women to hold their perpetrators accountable for a crime. In Sudan, a woman who has been raped must produce four male witnesses for a court to hear her case.
Also, unmarried victims who become pregnant face the risk of arrest for illegal pregnancy if they go to the police. The Sudanese government currently denies widespread rape in the conflict. The denials are inconsistent with the numerous and growing reports coming out of Darfur on rape victims, including the MSF report.12
A Worldwide Issue
Violence against women is not limited to certain regions of the world. Research into sources of violence against women varies across several perspectives—feminism, criminology, development, human rights, public health, and sociology. Among these perspectives, multiple factors lead to violence against women, but the universal underlying factor seems to stem from the historic power inequality between men and women.
As a result, violence of women occurs around the world in different forms—intimate partner or domestic violence, early and forced marriage, female genital mutilation and other traditional practices, femicide, rape and sexual violence, sexual harassment, and trafficking in women.13
The most common category of violence against women is domestic violence, and domestic violence occurs in every country. According to a 2005 report by the World Health Organization (WHO), in Bangladesh, Ethiopia, Tanzania, and Peru more than 50 percent of women in intimate relationships were subjected to physical or sexual violence by their intimate partners. The WHO study found Ethiopia with the highest rate of 71 percent.14
Domestic violence is found in all developed countries. Smaller studies in Europe have estimated rates of domestic abuse in European Union countries to range between 20 percent and 25 percent, while the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimate the rate to be 25 percent in the United States.15
Activism at the United Nations
International standards and national government laws have been insufficient in preventing chronic levels of violence against women. Policy-makers and activists continue to combat violence against women by raising awareness and establishing standards for plans of action.
The United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM) leads the effort. Through the UN Trust Fund in Support of Actions to Eliminating Violence against Women, UNIFEM has spent $10 million to undertake 198 initiatives in 100 countries.16 Its objective is to highlight gender inequality as the ultimate cause of violence against women. The initiatives target local, national, and regional efforts in the following areas:
• Promotion of protective laws and specific national actions
• Measurement of the problem through data collection and research
• Prevention, including in conflict and post-conflict situations
• Support for women’s organizations around the world
Several recent developments at the UN indicate the elevation of women issues on the UN agenda. Commissioned by General-Secretary Kofi Annan, a 140-page study on violence against women was published in October 2006.17
Concurrently, a high-level panel at the UN has proposed, as part of a reorganization plan at the UN, to merge the three women organizations, including UNIFEM, into one more powerful organization to be headed by an undersecretary-general, who would report directly to the secretary-general.18
This proposed change was scheduled for presentation to the General Assembly for ratification by the end of the 2006. It is heralded by Stephen Lewis, the UN special envoy for HIV/AIDs in Africa, as “the most dramatic step forward in decades, for women and for the UN.”19 With aims to achieve an annual budget half the size of UNICEF’s current two billion dollar budget, the reform would dramatically enhance the capabilities and financial resources toward the cause of women’s rights.
Meanwhile, with the fearful memory in mind of 1994 Rwanda where it is estimated 250,000 - 500,000 women were raped during the conflict,20 international calls for humanitarian intervention in Darfur are intensifying. Resolving this emergency in Darfur before the escalation of atrocities to the Rwandan war level is surely an essential pre-requisite for there to be any confidence in human progress toward the fundamental human right of elimination of violence against women.
United Nations Efforts To Secure Freedom from Torture
A dedicated Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment; was completed in 1984 and entered into force in 1987 (5). Article 1 of the Convention Against Torture defines torture, inhuman or degrading treatment in the following way:
An act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession, punishing him for an act he or a third person has committed or is suspected of having committed, or intimidating or coercing him or a third person, or for any reason based on discrimination of any kind, when such pain or suffering is inflicted by or at the instigation of or with the consent of or acquiescence of a public official or other person acting in an official capacity. It does not include pain or suffering arising only from, inherent in or incidental to lawful sanctions (6).
This definition is extremely broad, and the nature and limits of behavior covered by this language has been much debated. The key properties of torture, however, are clearly presented: (a) the infliction of severe pain or suffering, (b) the presence of an intention to torture, (c) a purpose to extract information or a confession or to punish, and (d) some form of authorization by officials in power.
The Convention established a UN Committee on Torture and appointed a Special Rapporteur on Torture to coordinate the UN’s efforts and to investigate individual complaints through country visits and annual reports (7). It should be noted that torture is also discussed in the International Bill of Rights in Article 5 of the Universal Declaration and Article 7 of the ICCPR.
on Torture to coordinate the UN’s efforts and to investigate individual complaints through country visits and annual reports (7). It should be noted that torture is also discussed in the International Bill of Rights in Article 5 of the Universal Declaration and Article 7 of the ICCPR.
The ban on torture encompasses four separate human rights. The first is the right to be protected from torture, whether carried out by states or private individuals, by all legal, administrative and judicial means available (Convention Against Torture, Articles 2 and 4) (8).
The second is the right to have those accused of torture prosecuted, wherever they may be (Convention Against Torture 5, 6, and 8). This is a good example of the blurred line between a right and duty, because the right to prosecution enjoyed by individuals also imposes an obligation on all states either to extradite suspects to the proper jurisdiction or to prosecute them themselves (9).
The third is the right of a person to not “be expelled, returned or extradited to another state” if there is suspicion that that person might be subject to torture, inhuman or degrading treatment (Convention Against Torture, Article 3). This principle of non-refoulement will be examined more closely later in this section (see “Non-Refoulement: Extraordinary Renditions and Outsourcing Torture”) (10).
The fourth is the “right of victims to obtain redress, fair compensation, including rehabilitation and the right of victims to make a complaint, to have it impartially investigated, and to be protected from retaliation for making complaints.” Forms of compensation can include financial awards, medical care, and other measures to restore a victim’s “dignity and reputation” in both the private and public spheres (11).
Information Technology (IT) is a driving factor in the process of globalization. Improvements in the early 1990s in computer hardware, software, and telecommunications have caused widespread improvements in access to information and economic potential. These advances have facilitated efficiency gains in all sectors of the economy. IT provides the communication network that facilitates the expansion of products, ideas, and resources among nations and among people regardless of geographic location. Creating efficient and effective channels to exchange information, IT has been the catalyst for global integration.
Information Technology
Recent advances in our ability to communicate and process information in digital form—a series of developments sometimes described as an "IT revolution"—are reshaping the economies and social lives of many countries around the world.
Products based upon or enhanced by information technology are used in nearly every aspect of life in contemporary industrial societies. The spread of IT and its applications has been extraordinarily rapid. Just 20 years ago, for example, the use of desktop personal computers was still limited to a fairly small number of technologically advanced people. The overwhelming majority of people still produced documents with typewriters, which permit no manipulation of text and offer no storage. Fifteen years ago, large and bulky mobile telephones were carried only by a small number of users in just a few U.S. cities. Today, more than half of all Americans use a mobile phone, and in some developing countries, mobile phones are used by more people than the fixed line telephone network.
But perhaps most dramatically, just fifteen years ago, only scientists were using (or had even heard about) the Internet, the World Wide Web was not up and running, and the browsers that help users navigate the Web had not even been invented yet. Today, of course, the Internet and the Web have transformed commerce, creating entirely new ways for retailers and their customers to make transactions, for businesses to manage the flow of production inputs and market products, and for job seekers and job recruiters to find each other.
The news industry also has been dramatically transformed by the emergence of numerous Internet-enabled news-gathering and dissemination outlets. Websites, chat rooms, instant messaging systems, e-mail, electronic bulletin boards and other Internet-based communication systems have made it much easier for people with common interests to find each other, exchange information, and collaborate with each other. Education at all levels is being transformed by communication, education, and presentationl software and by Websites and other sources of information and analysis on the Internet.
Advances in Information Technology: The IT revolution has been driven by the extraordinarily rapid decline in the cost and rapid increase in the processing power of digital technologies. The digital device whose technological advance has perhaps been most crucial to the IT revolution is the microprocessor, the collections of millions of tiny circuits that serve as the "brains" of personal computers and that are being embedded in an ever-expanding number of products, from video games, to cars, to refrigerators. Over the past two decades, the processing power of microprocessors has doubled roughly every six months.
Another set of advances that has been critical to the IT revolution has occurred in fiber optics. Fiber optics technology enables data, including voices captured in digital form, to be converted into tiny pulses of light and then transmitted at high speeds through glass fibers wrapped into large capacity telecommunication cables. Hundreds of thousands of miles of these cables have been installed over the past ten years, boosting the speed and capacity of telecommunications networks.
Advances in microprocessors, fiber optics, and a number of other complementary technologies, such as telecommunications switching devices and memory chips, have dramatically increased the speed, processing capacity, and storage space of computers and dramatically increased the speed and carrying capacity of telecommunications networks.
A key reason why these advances in IT have spread so quickly is that they have progressively reduced the cost of a unit of computing power or the transmission of a message. For less than $1,000, Americans without any advanced technical training can purchase and use a desktop computer whose data processing power far exceeds the room-sized computers that powered the spacecraft that carried astronauts to the moon and back in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
The decline in computing prices has been a factor in spurning the growth of computers in the developing world (see Figure 1). Countries such as China, Russia, Indonesia, India, and Brazil experienced tremendous growth in the number of personal computers. Between 1993-2000 the growth rate of personal computers per capita exceeded 500 percent for each of these nations. Worldwide, the sales of MS-DOS & Windows PC computers grew from six millions units in 1981 to 855 millions units in 2006 (Source Computer Industry Almanac).
The spread of digital technologies also has been spurred by several unique attributes of information, the principal input and product of many IT industries. In contrast to more tangible products, like consumer goods, one person's "consumption" of a piece of information does not necessarily reduce or eliminate the possibility that another person might benefit from the same piece of information.
Furthermore, networks built upon the exchange of information, like the Internet, tend to become more valuable to existing participants as new participants link up with them. Finally, the cost of using digital technologies, such as Internet service providers, decreases as the number of users increases. All of these factors have worked together to promote rapid growth in the demand for and supply of IT products and services. During the second half of the 1990s, as more people bought computers and went online, the average cost of the equipment and services necessary to access the Internet declined.
IMPACT OF TECHNOLOGY.
Industrial Structure and Jobs
Developments in computing and telecommunications technology are changing America's industrial landscape and its workforce. The application of new digital technologies to management, manufacturing, distribution, and services has produced significant and lasting increases in productivity, or output per hour. The new technologies have also created new industries (e.g., Internet access providers) and entirely new kinds of work (e.g., website designers) and boosted other industries. But the new technologies have also shrunk or even eliminated other industries and the jobs associated with them (e.g., electric typewriters).
IT is fundamentally restructuring business practices. IT innovations have increased the efficiency of business operations. New IT-based inventory systems allow businesses to cut costs by delivering or receiving parts for "just-in-time" assembly. By reducing delivery times and inventories, "just-in-time" assembly allows businesses to meet consumer demand more quickly and cheaply.
IT and the use of the Internet have also dramatically transformed exchanges between buyers and sellers. Some Web-based businesses, such as Amazon.com, are using the Internet to sell and arrange for the delivery of large quantities of goods without access to a network of wholesalers and retail stores. "Business-to-business" ("B2B") commerce over the Internet is helping many companies streamline their sourcing of production inputs and sell products or services to other companies. Companies are using the Internet to find other businesses that might want to buy their products or services or sell them products or services. The value of B2B e-commerce exceeds the value of e-commerce between Internet retailers and individual consumers.
Over the past five years there has also been a proliferation of on-line employment marketplaces, which offer new tools for buyers and sellers of labor to link up with each other. Internet-based recruitment services enable employers to post job announcements on the Internet and prospective employees to search job listings or post their resumes.
Global E-commerce surged from $130.2 billion in 1999 to nearly $1.640 billion in 2003. This tenfold increase during a four-year time period highlights the incredible growth potential of e-commerce. Figure three below shows the growth of e-commerce in the U.S. from 1999 to 2006.1 Despite the growth of e-commerce, only eleven percent of all payments in the U.S. are electronic.2
Applications of new IT have boosted U.S. labor productivity, or output per worker. From 1974 to 1990, labor productivity grew by 1.4 percent per year. Between 1991 and 1995, annual productivity growth increased slightly, to 1.5 percent per year. From 1996 to 2005, however, as companies invested heavily in IT equipment, software, and services, annual productivity growth soared from 1.5 percent to 4 percent per year according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics measuring non-farm output per hour. As of November 2007, U.S. productivity growth was 4.9 percent in the non-farm business sector for the third-quarter of 2007.3
Figure 4: Source US Dept. of Labor
Most economists attribute this sustained increase in annual productivity growth to the pairing of labor with new kinds of IT across a broad swath of the U.S. economy. Many economists believe the recent productivity gains will endure for the foreseeable future.
Extraordinary labor productivity growth, coupled with a rapid increase in Internet usage by businesses and individual, has prompted some economists and other analysts to argue that the United States now has a "new economy." According to this view, permanently higher productivity, more versatile and flexible corporations, and a likely reduction in the periodic ups and downs of economic activity, known as the business cycle, characterize the new economy.
One significant implication of the new economy theory, if it is correct, is that the United States will be able to grow at a faster rate than has been the historical norm, without generating price inflation. Among other things, higher, non-inflationary growth would enable further reductions in our unemployment rate.
Financial Markets
A second area in which the impact of information technology has been profound is in financial markets. Financial markets encompass a wide variety of institutions and practices through which lenders and borrowers are able to interact. Lenders include banks and other financial institutions that make loans to individuals (e.g., for house or car purchases) and to institutions (e.g., for expansion or acquisitions).
These lenders are typically compensated for the money they lend through interest payments or, in some cases, an ownership stake in an enterprise. Individual investors who buy corporate stocks and bonds or government bonds are also lenders, and the companies and governments that sell the investors the stock or bonds are borrowers.
The borrowers hope to use the money raised through these transactions for new equipment, new lines of business, or other productive purposes. The investor-lenders receive compensation for their investments through interest earnings, dividends, or an increase in the value of their stock or bond holdings.
Stock markets are perhaps the most familiar institutions in the financial marketplace, but a wide variety of other institutions and investment vehicle, or "instruments" are available to those hoping to earn or raise money. These include bond markets, foreign exchange markets, futures markets and options markets to mention a few. Each of these markets for financial markets has been impacted by the efficiency improvements from IT.
A combination of policy reforms and IT innovations has transformed financial markets over the past two decades. Governments around the world have modified or eliminated regulations that limited innovation and competition in their financial markets. They have also reduced barriers to foreign participation in their markets.
New IT developments have spurred innovation and international expansion in financial markets in three ways:
• By permitting complex domestic and international transactions to be conducted rapidly and securely.
• By enhancing data storage, analysis, and other data-dependent tasks associated with the management of financial institutions.
• By giving market actors of all sizes access to a wide array of information on investment and borrowing opportunities, the performance of companies and financial institutions, economic trends, and policy developments.
Building upon policy reforms and technological developments, private financial firms have over the past two decades created numerous new vehicles, or "instruments," through which people and institutions can lend, invest, or raise money. Reforms and technology have also helped multiply cross-border linkages among national financial markets.
As recently as the 1970s, individual investors, firms, and governments were generally able to invest or raise capital only within their own self-contained, national financial systems. Access to foreign bank loans, stocks, and other financial instruments was available only to the most sophisticated investors.
Closed markets like these are hard to imagine today. Cross-border financial arrangements have become commonplace. A global financial market has emerged, and the volume and value of the transactions it supports is staggering. The total daily value of foreign exchange transactions (exchanges of one national currency for another) has increased from 18.3 billion dollars in 1977 to three trillion dollars in April 2007.
Financial Markets
A second area in which the impact of information technology has been profound is in financial markets. Financial markets encompass a wide variety of institutions and practices through which lenders and borrowers are able to interact. Lenders include banks and other financial institutions that make loans to individuals (e.g., for house or car purchases) and to institutions (e.g., for expansion or acquisitions).
These lenders are typically compensated for the money they lend through interest payments or, in some cases, an ownership stake in an enterprise. Individual investors who buy corporate stocks and bonds or government bonds are also lenders, and the companies and governments that sell the investors the stock or bonds are borrowers.
The borrowers hope to use the money raised through these transactions for new equipment, new lines of business, or other productive purposes. The investor-lenders receive compensation for their investments through interest earnings, dividends, or an increase in the value of their stock or bond holdings.
Stock markets are perhaps the most familiar institutions in the financial marketplace, but a wide variety of other institutions and investment vehicle, or "instruments" are available to those hoping to earn or raise money. These include bond markets, foreign exchange markets, futures markets and options markets to mention a few. Each of these markets for financial markets has been impacted by the efficiency improvements from IT.
A combination of policy reforms and IT innovations has transformed financial markets over the past two decades. Governments around the world have modified or eliminated regulations that limited innovation and competition in their financial markets. They have also reduced barriers to foreign participation in their markets.
New IT developments have spurred innovation and international expansion in financial markets in three ways:
• By permitting complex domestic and international transactions to be conducted rapidly and securely.
• By enhancing data storage, analysis, and other data-dependent tasks associated with the management of financial institutions.
• By giving market actors of all sizes access to a wide array of information on investment and borrowing opportunities, the performance of companies and financial institutions, economic trends, and policy developments.
Building upon policy reforms and technological developments, private financial firms have over the past two decades created numerous new vehicles, or "instruments," through which people and institutions can lend, invest, or raise money. Reforms and technology have also helped multiply cross-border linkages among national financial markets.
As recently as the 1970s, individual investors, firms, and governments were generally able to invest or raise capital only within their own self-contained, national financial systems. Access to foreign bank loans, stocks, and other financial instruments was available only to the most sophisticated investors.
Closed markets like these are hard to imagine today. Cross-border financial arrangements have become commonplace. A global financial market has emerged, and the volume and value of the transactions it supports is staggering. The total daily value of foreign exchange transactions (exchanges of one national currency for another) has increased from 18.3 billion dollars in 1977 to three trillion dollars in April 2007.
Benefits
The global financial market built with IT offers an extraordinary range of opportunities to invest and borrow money, benefiting investors, firms, and economies. On the borrowing side, if a U.S. entrepreneur is not satisfied with her American options for raising funds for a new business, she can seek funds in Europe or Japan. The wider range of options available to borrowers like these has increased competition among lenders, helping to keep the cost of borrowing down. This has made it easier for firms to finance business expansion plans and acquisitions, generating jobs and economic growth.
Likewise, on the investing side, a European stock investor hoping to earn a higher return than he can earn in his home stock market can now explore alternative investments in the United States. Access to a wider range of international opportunities has helped successful investors increase their earnings and minimize risk through diversification of their investment portfolios.
The global financial market has increased the growth potential of individual countries. By opening up their financial sectors to international flows of capital, countries have been able to acquire the funds they need to support all sorts of private and public sector development initiatives. These funds have the potential to spur higher levels of growth.
Improving Sectors of Society: Health, Education, and Government
The information revolution is creating opportunities in many other sectors of society, including three that are fundamentally important to the quality of people's lives everywhere: health care, education, and government. Over the past decade, new applications of information and communication technology have improved services, transparency, and public access in each of these areas.
By improving access to health care and education, and by improving the delivery of government services, new IT has the potential to help people around the world overcome geographic or income barriers that have degraded the quality of their lives. By dramatically increasing access to information, the technologies can enhance knowledge, break down barriers to participation, and improve the accountability of public institutions to people. These developments will be especially beneficial to people in poor and underserved communities around the world.
But the great promise of these technologies to improve the quality of lives carries with it an implicit risk: that gaps in technological access will reinforce and perhaps even widen existing gaps in living standards. Access to the promising things that information technology can provide requires access to the technology itself—not just the hardware, but the software and the knowledge necessary to make the hardware work.
There is already alarming evidence that access to IT varies widely from community to community and from country to country. These wide variations in access to IT could lead to the exclusion of large numbers of people from the benefits of the knowledge economy.
In this section we look at some of the ways that IT is enhancing knowledge in health care, education, and government. In the next section we look at gaps in access to IT, sometimes known as the "digital divide."
Health Care
IT is dramatically improving health care in the following ways:
• prevention and control of emerging infectious diseases,
• patient to health care provider interaction,
• rapid dissemination of information,
• and improved responses to outbreak situations.
Efforts to contain outbreaks of dangerous infectious diseases require the rapid collection and transmission of detailed patient data to medical labs or public health centers. Health professionals need tools to communicate important scientific or epidemiological findings to other parts of the health care community. IT is enhancing capacity in each of these areas.
Many health problems in developing countries are being addressed using IT. Digital records and images utilizing digital cameras have made it possible for doctors around the world to share information or offer advice on treatments for complicated ailments. For example, using Internet connections, doctors working in remote regions of northern Uganda during an outbreak of the deadly Ebola virus would be able rapidly to transmit their findings to experts at the World Health Organization in Geneva and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta.
Before the arrival of the Internet, transferring detailed patient information of this kind could take as long as two weeks. In conditions like these, when the rapid dissemination of information is vital to treating infected persons and containing an outbreak, IT can provide tools for an efficient outbreak response.
Public health officials are also using new technologies to study the impact of health interventions and to target disease prevention programs. For example, health agencies have used satellite-based global positioning systems (GPS) to monitor the spread of West Nile Virus in the United States. Data collection and monitoring technologies like these increase the information available to public health officials when they make important health policy decisions.
Information Technology Applications in Health and Medicine
• Patients will have access to their medical records from any location via secured Internet sites. Readily available medical records will help ensure that individuals receive appropriate care when traveling or changing medical institutions.
• New devices are able to determine the chemical content of blood when placed on top of the skin.
• A simple digital watch can be incorporated into a pill bottle-cap to record the time and date when the bottle was opened. This will allow medical personnel to monitor the use of medication by patients.
Education
IT improves educational opportunities by enabling educators and students to overcome barriers of distance and by enhancing the content of instructional materials.
The use of IT to deliver lessons or training from instructors in one location to students in another is frequently called "distance learning." Distance learning has been around for a long time. For many years people have listened to recordings of classroom lectures or other educational presentations, and millions of people have watched educational programming on public televisions channels.
But the emergence of the Internet and developments in educational software has vastly enhanced distance education over the past decade. The geographic reach of distance education has been extended. There has been a substantial increase in the quantity and diversity of educational material available over the Internet or through the use of satellite video and audio linkups.
Over the past decade, computers and Internet connections have been widely deployed in classrooms, from pre-K through the university level. Lessons delivered through computers can be interactive, which gives students real-time feedback on their work and enables them to work at their own pace. Kids love working with computers, so when they are intelligently integrated into classrooms, computers can create excitement about learning among students.
The Internet provides an extraordinary opportunity for students to extend the reach of their learning. Before the Internet, the resources available to students were largely those that could be found in their classrooms or in public libraries. The Internet enables students to reach well beyond the physical confines of their classrooms and gain access to virtually unlimited quantities of information on the topics or events they are discussing in their classrooms. The use of the Internet for school assignments also encourages students to give free rein to their curiosity, and strengthens their research and investigative skills.
IT offers especially valuable educational opportunities for poor people in developing countries. Students and other residents of poor countries are increasingly using the Internet—often in community Internet centers—to gain access to information and communicate via e-mail. Doctors, scientists, and other professionals, for example, can achieve cheap or free access to journals and other professional publications that are too expensive to afford in hard-copy versions.
Government aid agencies, foundations, and private firms are sponsoring numerous distance education programs designed to teach skills to a wide variety of developing country professionals, government officials, engineers, scientists, and businesspeople. Internet or satellite connections enable students from developing countries to take courses offered in foreign institutions. In these and other ways, technology-enabled educational programs can help strengthen the people who will be called upon to provide leadership in developing countries in a wide variety of social welfare, economic, and political fields.
Government
IT can enhance interactions between citizens and their governments in several ways. The use of IT in government, sometimes called "e-government," can enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of government services. E-government can also help achieve other important goals of good governance, such as accountability and transparency.
In democratic societies, information on government activities should be readily available for review by the public. Prior to the emergence of computer databases, the Internet, and other IT innovations, large quantities of government documents were not easily accessible to most citizens. Using these technologies, governments today can provide citizens with fast and free access to a wide variety of documents and records.
Access to official information is critical to ensuring that governments are accountable to citizens—that they are responsive to citizens and that they are doing what they are obligated to do under law. The capacity to track government budget expenditures, for example, enables taxpayers to ensure that governments are trustworthy stewards of the funds entrusted to them.
IT can also provide mechanisms through which governments can interact with citizens. Government websites can provide quick access to information on building regulations, motor vehicle licenses, or immunizations, for example. Information technology can also improve the performance and efficiency of government bureaucracies, and enhance interagency cooperation. In these ways, technology can strengthen the delivery of government services. For example, in India, an e-governance initiative is being implemented to improve citizen access to public services and increase the transparency of government transactions.
Introduction
The current wave of globalization has greatly improved the lives of women worldwide, particularly in the developing world. Nevertheless, women remain disadvantaged in many areas of life. For example, the Center for Global Development estimates that 43 million primary age girls are not enrolled in school. In only 18 countries in the world do women hold even one-third of seats in the legislature. Five hundred thousand women die in pregnancy or childbirth each year. An African woman, for instance, faces a 1 in 16 chance of dying in childbirth in her lifetime, while in the industrialized world, the chance is 1 in 2,800.
The UN’s Millennium Development Goals therefore prioritize gender equality and empowerment of women. As part of the Millennium Goals, the international community, especially the UN, will monitor indicators of gender equality such as levels of female enrollment at school, participation in the workplace, and representation in decision-making positions.
Two key international declarations form the basis for this agenda. As part of its “Decade for Women,” the UN published the Nairobi Forward-Looking Strategies for the Advancement of Women in 1985 with the purpose of creating a blueprint for global action to achieve women’s equality by the year 2000. Ten years later, the Fourth World Conference on Women, held in Beijing in 1995 issued the Beijing Platform for Action aimed to update and invigorate the world community’s commitment to gender equality.
These international conferences and documents have served to crystallize the understanding of the unique problems women face worldwide and to promote efforts to address them. More recently, means to monitor the progress of both have been implemented. Other, similar documents deal with specific challenges to women’s rights. For example, the Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women guarantees women equal rights with men in all spheres of life, including education, employment, health care, suffrage, nationality, and marriage.
This Issue Brief will examine the effects of globalization on women worldwide, namely on their participation in the economy, representation in the political process, education, health, and sexual slavery. It also will discuss perhaps globalization’s greatest benefits to women in the internationalization of the movement for gender equality, and the legal structure that supports this goal and recognizes women’s rights as basic human rights.
Participation in the Economy
The International Monetary Fund and the World Bank encourage developing countries to use export-led growth to expand their economies. Such globalized economies require a labor force of a size that must include women, but women’s employment varies greatly by region. For example, 74 percent of women are in the work force in East Asia, the greatest proportion among all regions of the world, and they participate for the longest part of their lives in comparison to other regions. In the Middle East and North Africa, however, only about 34 percent participate.
Similarly, South American women participate in the labor force more as they age, indicating that they must contribute more income as their household grows following marriage, while women in the Middle East and North Africa drop out of the labor force in great numbers when they marry and have children.
What accounts for these differences? In many cases, cultural barriers, especially in the relationship between women and men within households, impede increased economic participation, or undermine the quality of that participation. For example, even women who do work face differential treatment such as wage gaps and segregation into traditionally female industries. Women have historically borne the burden of non-monetized labor, such as child care and domestic work.
Globalization is changing these norms. The new global developing economies demand women in the monetized as well as non-monetized sectors of work. In fact, globalization has the potential to improve women’s economic achievement. For example, increased employment opportunities for women in non-traditional sectors might enable them to earn and control income, giving a source of empowerment and enhancing women’s capacity to negotiate their role and status within the household and society.
Furthermore, according to the World Bank’s report Enhancing Women’s Participation in Economic Development, women’s economic development will benefit their households and society as a whole: “International experience has proved that support for a stronger role for women in society contributes to economic growth through improved child survival rates, better family health, and reduced fertility rates.”
Increased participation in the work force also implies increased hazards for women, however. Women’s jobs outside the home tend to be the worst compensated, least secure, and most dangerous available in the economy, especially in this period of recession in most developing countries. For example, gaps in labor laws, or ignorance and lack of enforcement of the labor codes in practice, allow for the exploitation of women. In Guatemala, women constitute 80 percent of the textile factory sector, and thousands of mostly indigenous women provide services as domestic servants. In both sectors, women have only a precarious claim on the rights to Guatemala’s legally mandated minimum wage, work-week length, leave time, health care under the national social security system, and privacy protections. Often, they are subject to physical and/or sexual abuse, according to Human Rights Watch.
Unfortunately, even the global nature of business does not confer universal rights for these women. Many U.S.-based companies, such as Target, The Limited, Wal-Mart, GEAR for Sports, Liz Claiborne, and Lee Jeans, have contracts with Guatemalan factories and continue to honor them even if the factories break explicit company policy, such as physically examining women to determine if they are pregnant and denying health care to employees. According to Human Rights Watch, strengthening legal protection for women laborers and increasing their access to legal recourse might cement increased participation in the work as a positive development for women.
Still, while globalization may have increased women’s vulnerability and dependency, there is hope that prioritizing women’s issues has yielded progress and will continue to do so. As the UN has stated, “Women have entered the labor force in unprecedented numbers, increasing the potential for their ability to participate in economic decision making at various levels, starting with the household.”
Representation in the Political Process
While the goal of gender equality has been lauded in many international agreements, including the Millennium Development Goals, many governments lack meaningful participation by women. Increased representation of women in governmental institutions and decision-making bodies is crucial for the overall empowerment of women, especially their inclusion in decision making about issues besides those that are traditionally known as “women’s issues,” such as child and elder care and reproductive health. The 1995 Beijing Fourth World Conference on Women recommended many programs for this purpose, but recent data indicate that the process has been slow and has achieved uneven results worldwide.
The Beijing Conference recommended calling upon the international community and civil society, including non-governmental organizations and the private sector, to take strategic action to reduce inequality between men and women in the sharing of power and decision making at all levels. Following this conference, in 1996, the UN Economic and Social Council requested that the UN Division for the Advancement of Women (DESA) conduct a survey to gather sex-disaggregated data on the composition of national governmental institutions to start the research and build a statistical database on the role of women in government, which were gathered from 187 countries revealed telling information.
For instance, the number of female, government ministers worldwide doubled in the last decade, from 3.4 percent in 1987 to 6.8 percent in 1996. While this seems to indicate that women are gaining positions and increasing their stature in government, the overall picture is mixed, and the statistic masks the disparity between countries. For example, Finland and Sweden have a total of 30 percent of women at the ministerial level and several countries such as Austria, Denmark, Ireland, Netherlands, and Norway have 20-29 percent at that level. But all other countries had less than 20 percent women at the ministerial level.
Additionally, this data reveals that women ministers were predominately concentrated in social areas compared with legal, economic, or political areas. It is important to note as well that these statistics were gathered after the completion of the 1995 Beijing Fourth World Conference on Women, where 189 governments committed themselves to take steps to achieve the goal of achieving democracy through equal representation.
Recently, a new report from the United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM) has supported the findings of the 1996 DESA study. UNIFEM’s report, Progress of the World’s Women 2002: Volume: Gender Equality and the Millennium Development Goals, is the second of a biennial publication that tracks and measures the global commitment to gender equality. The report points out that many international conferences have agreed to the target of reaching 30 percent representation of women in government, and there were definite signs of progress in all regions between 2000 and 2002 towards meeting this goal.
In 2006, women still only account for 16.3 percent of all members in parliaments, a statistic that is not much improved from the 1996 numbers. The increases in parliamentary seats that have been gained by women were attributed mainly to political measures such as quotas that were adopted on a voluntary basis. There are 77-countries that have set quotas for women’s political participation. All of the 18 countries that have reached the 30 percent mark in 2006—Rwanda, Sweden, Costa Rica, Finland, Norway, Denmark, the Netherlands, Cuba, Spain, Argentina, Mozambique, Belgium, Austria, Iceland, South Africa, New Zealand, Germany, Burundi, and Tanzania—implemented quotas.1
Building on the idea that segments of the population will be best served when they are represented in decision-making bodies, the World Economic Forum created the Women Leaders Initiative (WEF) in 2002 to increase the participation of women in the global economy by increasing their representation by women leaders at global summits. WEF said it hoped to “foster leadership and integrate women into a global dialogue and reinforce efforts to identify, inspire and encourage women to work together.”
There are more dimensions to increasing women’s representation, however, than simply seats available to them. First, the UN admits that it is difficult to produce global estimates of the degree to which women’s positions in public leadership have been increased, and that any quantitative study cannot cover the breadth of women’s involvement in decision making. Secondly, securing parliamentary seats through quotas does not mean that the women who assume these positions are fully prepared for them or are aware that gaining a seat is only the first part of a long process of securing women’s equality.
The case of women’s representation in the new Bulgarian parliament is a good example of this problem. Initially, the representation of women in the Bulgarian parliament was credited to the active campaigning by women’s non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and the liberal politics of the new political party, the National Movement for Simeon II (NMSII) (a party that called for the return of the monarchy) that won 43 percent of the seats in the 2001 parliamentary election. The Bulgarian Gender Research Foundation (BGRF) and the Women’s Alliance for Development campaigned for more women in parliament through rallies and organized meetings with parliamentarians of all the parties.
During the elections in 2001, the NMSII campaign accepted the movement’s position and placed women in 40 percent of eligible positions, after the elections in which women secured 26.2 percent of the vote. After the election, however, a BGRF study “found that women in parliament were not fully prepared for their careers. They did not see themselves representing women’s interests, nor did they see themselves as having common interests with each other. NGOs will need to continue to work with the new women parliamentarians to bring women’s issues higher up on their agendas.”
Education
Two-thirds of the world’s children who are not enrolled in school and two-thirds of the world’s illiterate are female. The UN Millennium Development Goal to promote gender equality and empower women therefore uses education as its target and gender disparity in education as its indicator of progress. Through the efforts of the international community, the UN hopes to eliminate gender disparity in primary and secondary education, preferably by 2005, and in all levels of education no later than 2015.
Education is crucial because, according to United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), inequality in education is highly correlated to poverty, and its elimination would help alleviate poverty in general. In addition, UNESCO says that female education has spillover effects for society, including improved fertility rates, household and child health, and educational opportunities for the rest of the household. In addition, increased skill level allows women to participate more in the economy, and increase the economic prosperity of the family.
To address the failure to provide basic education for all, which is defined as a basic human right in the Universal Declaration on Human Rights, the World Education Forum (WEF) produced the Education For All targets, which include ending inequality between males and females in education. The Forum recommended that governments and organizations implement integrated strategies for gender equality in education that recognize the need for changes in attitudes, values, and practices.
While some improvements have been made in educating girls in the developing world, particularly in the Middle East and North Africa where the education systems benefit from oil revenues and women now constitute up to 63 percent of university students, gender gaps in enrollment remain pronounced. In some countries, the gap is widening despite the specific recent international focus. It is notable that in the developed world females slightly outnumber males in school, while in the developing world the gap averages eight percentage points. Between 1980 and 1998, the gender gap increased in two regions: Eastern Europe and Sub Saharan Africa. In addition, the lessening gap apparent in other regions, such as South America, may be due to smaller enrollment of boys instead of greater enrollment of girls.
Several of the world’s poorest countries, in Sub Saharan Africa, west Asia, and the Arab states, will fail to reach Education For All targets, especially gender parity, by the agreed date of 2005. UNESCO’s monitoring team found that norms and values hold females back as much or more than policy. The education of girls is not valued in many societies because they are expected to contribute more at home, while boys should gain skills to work outside the home.
There exist region-specific hazards for girls as well. For example, in South America, the further a school is from a household, the less likely girls are to attend, because travel introduces an increased risk of assault and rape. In parts of the Middle East and North Africa, the public life of a female is so limited that exposure to anything outside the home seems unnecessary.
A World Bank study found that incentive-based enrollment programs can overcome even deeply imbedded cultural resistance. For example, when girls in Bangladesh were offered a small salary for attending and passing school, community protests subsided, or parents affected change, on issues such as female students taught by men and constructing separate latrines for males and females.
Health
Everyone in the developing world remains more susceptible to poor health because of lack of services, or lack of access to services, and a lack of education and information about health issues. Women have additional vulnerabilities, especially malnutrition, sexually transmitted diseases, pregnancy complications, cervical and breast cancer, domestic violence, sexual abuse, and genital mutilation. In many cultures, women are the first to take care of the vulnerable, sick, and dying and the last to receive preventative or life saving treatment.
To alleviate these problems, the World Bank’s emphasizes public education programs that promote healthy lifestyles, eliminate gender discrimination in education and access to services, and prioritize the help for young girls “since adolescence is the stage at which the intergenerational cycle of early pregnancy, poor health and nutrition, and poverty can be broken.” According to the Bank, investments that improve women’s health and nutrition are justified on both economic and humanitarian grounds, because they serve to alleviate poverty and develop human resources.
Maternal health is one of the most important elements in these efforts. The Millennium Development Goals have charged the UN Children’s Education Fund (UNICEF) and the World Health Organization (WHO) with promoting and monitoring a reduction in maternal mortality by three quarters between 1990 and 2015. Sub-Saharan Africa has the largest problem with maternal mortality, with 1,100 maternal deaths per 100,000 live births, a figure more than twice as high as in any other region.
Reasons for maternal mortality include delays in seeking medical help, transporting pregnant women to health centers, and receiving medical assistance, and may be attributable to social, cultural, religious, and economic factors. For example, a woman may not alter her lifestyle or workload inside and outside the home, because she cannot afford to and because the expectant father does not alter his, burdening her physically and leaving no time for medical attention, which often requires time and travel to obtain.
A sensitive issue for women’s global health is the role of reproductive rights. The Platform for Action takes a definitive stance in defense of such rights, including abortion. Empirical evidence shows that, in all world regions, household size contributes directly to poverty and to the workload borne by women. The percentage of poor women decreases with a corresponding decrease in fertility rate. In addition to being a cause of higher welfare for women, lower fertility rates are also shown to be an effect of other positive indicators of development, especially higher education rates and well-functioning markets for labor and credit.
Thus, a woman may want to plan or even terminate a pregnancy, requiring access to birth control and abortion, and information about these options. The Platform for Action calls a well-informed decision on family planning the right of every woman. Unsafe abortions are also a threat to women’s health. WHO estimates that 13 percent of maternal deaths are caused by unsafe abortions, and that 20 million of the 40 to 60 million abortions performed each year in the world are unsafe with negative consequences for women’s health.
Nevertheless, these issues remain controversial, especially in traditional or religious societies, such as Catholic and Muslim countries. At the Beijing Conference, and in the years that followed, the Vatican, Central American countries, and some Muslim countries such as Egypt, opposed the Platform for Action, insisting that information about sexual and reproductive issues should be given to parents to relay to their children, rather than directly to adolescents. They also oppose abortion rights, which the Platform for Action recognizes as a health issue for women.
Another problem is the HIV/AIDS virus, especially in Sub Saharan Africa and South East Asia, which has grown into an epidemic that affects women more adversely than men, because they are less well educated about it and less well protected from it. Women are twice as likely as men to be infected with HIV/AIDS, and in some areas young women are up to six times more likely than men to become infected.
UNIFEM has tried to counter the feminization of infection by promoting gender equality: “Gender inequality is fuelling the rapid spread of HIV with women divested of control over their lives and their bodies. Many women and girls are not in a position to say no to unwanted sex, nor can they negotiate condom use.” In addition to elevated biological vulnerabilities and cultural restraints on their sexual empowerment, women are at increased risk for contracting HIV for economic reasons: “Financial or material dependence on men means that women cannot control when, with whom and in what circumstances they have sex; many women have to exchange sex for material favors, for daily survival.” WHO has in response declared that women have a right to sexuality that does not endanger their lives and uses this principle to guide their work to prevent HIV/AIDSs.
Finally, some traditional cultural practices impose threats to the health of women, and may be more difficult to change through educational and preventative policies than unhealthy practices that are unrelated to culture, such as nutrition. The UN Human Rights Commission identifies the practices most threatening to women as:
• female circumcision, known as female genital mutilation to its opponents, which involves the excision of a woman’s external sexual organs;
• other forms of mutilation, such as facial scarring;
• various nutritional taboos;
• traditional practices associated with childbirth;
• the problem of dowries in some parts of the world;
• honor killing;
• and the consequences of preference for male babies, such as parental neglect and infanticide of female babies.
Several UN agencies and other international bodies, especially the WHO are actively engaged in efforts to eliminate such practices when they affect the health of women and the female children.
Female genital mutilation is a special focus of many efforts to end violence against women, although the movement to view it as a violation of human rights meets some resistance to what some consider a violation of family and community sanctity.
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), the cornerstone of the human rights system, asserts that all human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. It protects the right to security of person and the right not to be subjected to cruel inhuman or degrading treatment — rights which are of direct relevance to the practice of female genital mutilation. The traditional interpretation of these rights has generally failed to encompass forms of violence against women such as domestic violence or female genital mutilation. This arises from a common misconception that states are not responsible for human rights abuses committed within the home or the community.
Human rights campaigns have managed to raise awareness worldwide and promote more specific interpretations of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights that affirm that female genital mutilation, along with other forms of violence against women and harmful traditional practices, is an assault on the dignity, equality, and bodily integrity of women and an affront to human rights.
Modern Day Slavery
The International Labour Organization estimates that there are 2.45 million trafficking victims who are living in exploitive conditions and another 1.2 million people who are trafficked across and within borders. The U.S. State Department estimate 600,000 to 800,000 people trafficked across borders and between 18,000–20,000 of those are trafficked into the United States. These numbers include men, women, and children who are trafficked into forced labor or sexual exploitation, and appear to be on the rise worldwide. Globalization has provided for an easier means of exploiting those living in poverty who are seeking better lives, it also has provided for dramatic improvements in transportation and communications with which to facilitate the physical processing of persons.
The State Department report indicates that women are generally lured into slavery through promises of employment as shopkeepers, maids, nannies, or waitresses in developed countries. Upon arriving these women are then told they have been purchased by someone and must work as a prostitute to repay the enormous debt they suddenly owe. To ensure that these women do not flee, their "owners" often subject them to beatings, take their documents upon arrival, and keep them under conditions of slavery. These women then either physically cannot go to the authorities or are fearful of being deported, especially if the document do not have their documents or they were fraudulently obtained through their trafficker.
One of the main contributing factors to this increase in trafficking has been the widespread subjugation of women. Often ethnic minorities or lower class groups are more vulnerable to trafficking, because these women and girls have a very low social status that puts them at risk. Another contributor to the increase in trafficking is political and economic crisis in conflict or post-conflict areas. The breakdown of society and the rule of law have made these displaced populations vulnerable to the lure of a better future or an exit out of their current countries.
Trafficking flourishes because it is lucrative, generating $7-12 billion a year. In addition, the highly clandestine nature of the crime of human trafficking ensures that the great majority of human trafficking cases goes unreported and culprits remain at large. There are reports that many human traffickers are associated with international criminal organizations and are, therefore, highly mobile and difficult to prosecute. Further complicating matters, sometimes members of the local law enforcement agencies are involved in trafficking. Prosecution is made difficult because victims of trafficking do not testify against traffickers out of fear for their and their family members' lives.
According to Family Health International (1999), programs in Asia have started to publicly address the causes of trafficking in women in the area. For instance, Thailand focused on the source of demand for trafficked services, such as the clients of underage sex workers. Through the impetus and lobbying of the National Commission on Women's Affairs (NCWA), Thailand is the first country in the region to pass laws that impose greater penalties on customers than on sellers for involvement in commercial sex with underage partners. While the law has not been applied widely, it provides a possible framework or model for further legislation and enforcement in other countries.
South-East Asia and South Asia are considered to be home to the largest number of internationally trafficked persons, with estimates of 225,000 and 150,000 victims respectively. Several NGOs are also involved in awareness campaigns to draw attention to the causes of trafficking in women; specifically, the NCWA tries to change male sexual norms through a national poster campaign with messages showing a child saying "my father does not visit prostitutes." A Thai NGO called Development and Education Program for Daughters and Communities aims to prevent women and children from being forced into the illegal sex trade or child labor due to outside pressures, lack of education, and limited employment alternatives. The NGO uses a mix of strategies to convince parents about the dangers of the illegal sex trade. Information about HIV and AIDS, brothel conditions, legal penalties, and potential dangers is used to support their arguments.
Perhaps most importantly, the U.S. government has prioritized trafficking as a law-enforcement issue. The United States enacted the Trafficking Victims Protection Act of 2000, which strengthens pre-existing criminal penalties in other related laws, affords new protections to trafficking victims and makes available certain benefits and services to victims of severe forms of trafficking. Under this law, one option that is available to some victims who assist in the prosecution of their traffickers is the "T-Visa" that allows the victim to remain in the United States of America.
President Bush took up the issue, calling it a humanitarian crisis, in an address to the UN in 2003. “Each year, an estimated 800,000 to 900,000 human beings are bought, sold or forced across the world's borders. Among them are hundreds of thousands of teenage girls, and others as young as five, who fall victim to the sex trade. This commerce in human life generates billions of dollars each year—much of which is used to finance organized crime.”
Under the U.S. PROTECT Act, it is now illegal for an American to travel abroad, or for a foreigner to enter the U.S., for the purpose of sex tourism involving children. The Trafficking Victims Protection Act allows the U.S. to use sanctions to discourage trafficking. In addition, NGO- and government-led campaigns such as the UN’s Global Campaign Against Human Trafficking warn millions of potential victims about the dangers of trafficking.
Conclusion
Globalization offers women unprecedented opportunities, but equally new and unique challenges. Gender inequality springs from many sources, and it is often difficult to determine which forms of inequality are being eliminated by the effects of globalization, and which are exacerbated. Work toward eliminating gender inequality in the framework provided by the Beijing Platform for Action has created awareness, monitoring, and alleviation of the externalities that the new global system creates for women.
Progress toward eliminating gender inequality in the future depends on finding and embracing the occasions, mostly in the political and legal realm, where the global approach strengthens women’s security and welfare, and fighting the issues, mostly in the economic realm, where women are made worse off by the new global system.
Violence Against Women – Global War on a Global Issue
Published On: 12-13-2006
Related Issue Briefs:
| Women and Globalization | International Law and Organizations | Human Rights |
Darfur
A recent media report1 told the story of Aziza, a 17-year old girl in a refugee camp of victims displaced by the Darfur conflict in Sudan. Aziza was gathering firewood outside her camp one day in October when three armed men on horseback caught her and subjected her to rape. One of the men, an Arab and wearing a Sudanese uniform, said to her, “You are black. You have no place here. We will push you out of here. This land will remain for us.”2
Similar incidents are occurring regularly in Darfur. Human Rights Watch estimates that there have been thousands of rape victims in the Darfur conflict since 2003.3 In 2005, the non-governmental organization Médecins Sans Frontières/Doctors Without Borders (MSF) published a briefing paper titled “The Crushing Burden of Rape: Sexual Violence in Darfur,” with numerous accounts from its interactions with the victims in Darfur.
According to one account, the Janjaweed, Arab militia supported by the Sudanese government, are using rape to produce “lighter-skinned Arab babies” in the ethnic-cleansing of African ethnic groups in Darfur.4 In recent months, there has been an alarming increase in the number of reported incidents.5
As these reports continue to come out of Darfur, November 25, 2006 was recognized throughout the world as the International Day for the Elimination of Violence of Women. Since its official designation as such by the UN General Assembly in 1999, it has been a day when governments, international organizations, and NGOs have raised public awareness about gender-based violence.
This day marks the first of “16 Days of Activism against Gender Violence,” an annual international campaign to promote awareness of policies for the elimination of violence against women. Thousands of organizations in 130 countries participate in the campaign whose end coincides each year with International Human Rights Day on Dec 10.6
One notable event that occurred during these16 days in 2006 was the recommitment by 22 African governments to work collectively through the African Union (AU) to eliminate violence against women.7 Numerous conflicts like Darfur, and the resulting treatment of women and girls in them, highlight the extensive degree of gender-based violence on the African continent.8 Rape is contributing to the rampant spread of HIV in Sub-Saharan Africa.
A Human Rights Issue
Violence against women emerged as an international issue during the Decade of Women (1975 – 1985). During that decade, the international community created a set of international norms and standards as well as mechanisms for monitoring the reporting of advancements in women’s rights. The establishment in 1981 of the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), often described as an international bill of rights for women, led to the UN Declaration on the Elimination of Violence Against Women.
This Declaration explicitly defined gender-based violence as a human rights issue. The result of this definition is to bind the issue of violence against women to state responsibility, holding each nation accountable for the violations. Although less than half of the UN member states have legislation concerning gender-based violence, a significant number of countries have recently enacted such laws. As of 2006, 89 out of the 192 UN member states now have legislation against gender-based violence, an increase from 45 states in 2003.9
The International Court Tribunals for former Yugoslavia and for Rwanda, and the Special Court for Sierra Leone helped establish precedent in holding individuals accountable for violence against women during armed conflicts. The 1998 Rome Statute that established the International Criminal Court (ICC) includes gender-based crimes.10
Crimes against humanity now include violent acts against women—rape, sexual slavery, enforced prostitution, forced pregnancy, and enforced sterilization. Any use of rape for ethnic cleansing in Darfur would constitute a crime of genocide under the Geneva conventions.11
In certain countries, however, government laws actually foster violence against women by making it essentially impossible for women to hold their perpetrators accountable for a crime. In Sudan, a woman who has been raped must produce four male witnesses for a court to hear her case.
Also, unmarried victims who become pregnant face the risk of arrest for illegal pregnancy if they go to the police. The Sudanese government currently denies widespread rape in the conflict. The denials are inconsistent with the numerous and growing reports coming out of Darfur on rape victims, including the MSF report.12
A Worldwide Issue
Violence against women is not limited to certain regions of the world. Research into sources of violence against women varies across several perspectives—feminism, criminology, development, human rights, public health, and sociology. Among these perspectives, multiple factors lead to violence against women, but the universal underlying factor seems to stem from the historic power inequality between men and women.
As a result, violence of women occurs around the world in different forms—intimate partner or domestic violence, early and forced marriage, female genital mutilation and other traditional practices, femicide, rape and sexual violence, sexual harassment, and trafficking in women.13
The most common category of violence against women is domestic violence, and domestic violence occurs in every country. According to a 2005 report by the World Health Organization (WHO), in Bangladesh, Ethiopia, Tanzania, and Peru more than 50 percent of women in intimate relationships were subjected to physical or sexual violence by their intimate partners. The WHO study found Ethiopia with the highest rate of 71 percent.14
Domestic violence is found in all developed countries. Smaller studies in Europe have estimated rates of domestic abuse in European Union countries to range between 20 percent and 25 percent, while the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimate the rate to be 25 percent in the United States.15
Activism at the United Nations
International standards and national government laws have been insufficient in preventing chronic levels of violence against women. Policy-makers and activists continue to combat violence against women by raising awareness and establishing standards for plans of action.
The United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM) leads the effort. Through the UN Trust Fund in Support of Actions to Eliminating Violence against Women, UNIFEM has spent $10 million to undertake 198 initiatives in 100 countries.16 Its objective is to highlight gender inequality as the ultimate cause of violence against women. The initiatives target local, national, and regional efforts in the following areas:
• Promotion of protective laws and specific national actions
• Measurement of the problem through data collection and research
• Prevention, including in conflict and post-conflict situations
• Support for women’s organizations around the world
Several recent developments at the UN indicate the elevation of women issues on the UN agenda. Commissioned by General-Secretary Kofi Annan, a 140-page study on violence against women was published in October 2006.17
Concurrently, a high-level panel at the UN has proposed, as part of a reorganization plan at the UN, to merge the three women organizations, including UNIFEM, into one more powerful organization to be headed by an undersecretary-general, who would report directly to the secretary-general.18
This proposed change was scheduled for presentation to the General Assembly for ratification by the end of the 2006. It is heralded by Stephen Lewis, the UN special envoy for HIV/AIDs in Africa, as “the most dramatic step forward in decades, for women and for the UN.”19 With aims to achieve an annual budget half the size of UNICEF’s current two billion dollar budget, the reform would dramatically enhance the capabilities and financial resources toward the cause of women’s rights.
Meanwhile, with the fearful memory in mind of 1994 Rwanda where it is estimated 250,000 - 500,000 women were raped during the conflict,20 international calls for humanitarian intervention in Darfur are intensifying. Resolving this emergency in Darfur before the escalation of atrocities to the Rwandan war level is surely an essential pre-requisite for there to be any confidence in human progress toward the fundamental human right of elimination of violence against women.
United Nations Efforts To Secure Freedom from Torture
A dedicated Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment; was completed in 1984 and entered into force in 1987 (5). Article 1 of the Convention Against Torture defines torture, inhuman or degrading treatment in the following way:
An act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession, punishing him for an act he or a third person has committed or is suspected of having committed, or intimidating or coercing him or a third person, or for any reason based on discrimination of any kind, when such pain or suffering is inflicted by or at the instigation of or with the consent of or acquiescence of a public official or other person acting in an official capacity. It does not include pain or suffering arising only from, inherent in or incidental to lawful sanctions (6).
This definition is extremely broad, and the nature and limits of behavior covered by this language has been much debated. The key properties of torture, however, are clearly presented: (a) the infliction of severe pain or suffering, (b) the presence of an intention to torture, (c) a purpose to extract information or a confession or to punish, and (d) some form of authorization by officials in power.
The Convention established a UN Committee on Torture and appointed a Special Rapporteur on Torture to coordinate the UN’s efforts and to investigate individual complaints through country visits and annual reports (7). It should be noted that torture is also discussed in the International Bill of Rights in Article 5 of the Universal Declaration and Article 7 of the ICCPR.
on Torture to coordinate the UN’s efforts and to investigate individual complaints through country visits and annual reports (7). It should be noted that torture is also discussed in the International Bill of Rights in Article 5 of the Universal Declaration and Article 7 of the ICCPR.
The ban on torture encompasses four separate human rights. The first is the right to be protected from torture, whether carried out by states or private individuals, by all legal, administrative and judicial means available (Convention Against Torture, Articles 2 and 4) (8).
The second is the right to have those accused of torture prosecuted, wherever they may be (Convention Against Torture 5, 6, and 8). This is a good example of the blurred line between a right and duty, because the right to prosecution enjoyed by individuals also imposes an obligation on all states either to extradite suspects to the proper jurisdiction or to prosecute them themselves (9).
The third is the right of a person to not “be expelled, returned or extradited to another state” if there is suspicion that that person might be subject to torture, inhuman or degrading treatment (Convention Against Torture, Article 3). This principle of non-refoulement will be examined more closely later in this section (see “Non-Refoulement: Extraordinary Renditions and Outsourcing Torture”) (10).
The fourth is the “right of victims to obtain redress, fair compensation, including rehabilitation and the right of victims to make a complaint, to have it impartially investigated, and to be protected from retaliation for making complaints.” Forms of compensation can include financial awards, medical care, and other measures to restore a victim’s “dignity and reputation” in both the private and public spheres (11).
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