Is Trade Liberalisation Pro-Poor and Pro-Gender? The Case of Guyana

I aim to investigate the impact on poverty and gender of Guyana's trade liberalisation. The research will look in particular at comparing the two biggest agricultural sectors, rice and raw sugar production, where rice has considerable grown in recent times due to trade agreements, whereas sugar has shown a more constant production over time. The comparison will look at the differences across these two sectors that are export oriented, and benchmarked against other non-export oriented agricultural sectors. Census data and household-level surveys data will be used to apply a micro-econometric approach based on quasi-experimental techniques. As women comprise a large proportion of farmers and women are generally poorer than men, this study will shed light also on the interaction between development, trade and gender, contributing to a relatively nascent literature attracting lots of policy attention (e.g. from UNCTAD, the IMF and the World Bank). The impact on wages, employment, family formation, domestic labour-sharing, gender equality and spill-over effects on the next generation (e.g. children's education) and surrounding rural communities will be investigated. This will be the first micro-econometric study for Guyana looking at the impact of trade liberalisation on poverty, labour and gender, and one of the few studies on this topic to look at the rural sector in developing countries, complementing the nascent literature on trade, development and gender that has mostly focussed on the manufacturing sector.