Gender inclusive trade agreements for women-led structural transformation in India

This paper is authored by Tanu M. Goyal, Shravani Prakash, Ketaki Gaikwad, Keshav Sachdeva, ICRIER.

Women's full and equal participation in economic activities is increasingly recognised as a defining driver of sustainable and inclusive growth and development. A growing body of evidence shows that economies perform better when women participate fully as workers, entrepreneurs, traders, innovators, and leaders. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) estimates suggest that the economic disempowerment of women costs South Asia the equivalent of roughly 30% of regional Gross Domestic Product (GDP), while closing gender gaps in countries where they are the widest could raise output by as much as 35%. Realising this potential requires addressing the constraints that continue to limit women's economic participation, including social and cultural norms, the disproportionate burden of unpaid care work and structural barriers embedded in labour markets. Equally important is building an enabling ecosystem that actively invites, supports and rewards women's participation by creating positive pathways for entry and advancement. However, gender inclusion does not emerge automatically; it must be intentionally integrated into systems, institutions, laws, instruments, business practises and public policies, with mechanisms that can ensure effective implementation at scale.

Gender equality (Getty Images/iStockphoto)

This paper examines global trends in gender-responsive trade policy by tracing how gender provisions in regional trade agreements (RTAs) have evolved from declaratory language towards institutionalised mechanisms and what this shift implies for domestic policy space. It assesses the recently enforced India-UK CETA’s design against global benchmarks and India’s own structural constraints, including export-oriented manufacturing’s untapped potential to absorb female labour, capacity constraints due to the dominance of Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises (MSMEs) and barriers to network and information access that keep women-led enterprises out of trade. The paper argues that enforceability is not the sole measure of a provision’s strength, and that commitments calibrated to national circumstance can generate substantive obligations over time through a robust implementation practise, with India-UK CETA’s Working Group as the test case for whether they do.

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This paper is authored by Tanu M. Goyal, Shravani Prakash, Ketaki Gaikwad, Keshav Sachdeva, ICRIER.