Empowerment Under Globalization – Making Markets Work for Women
Acharya M1*
1. Tanka Prasad Acharya Memorial Foundation, Kathmandu, Nepal
The paper investigates the impact of economic processes triggered by
increasing market penetration and globalization on the empowerment of
women in economies (like that of Nepal) that have until fairly recently
been largely based on subsistence production. The key questions investigated
include: how are changing product and labor markets related to various
dimensions of women’s (and poor people’s) empowerment in the
specific context of subsistence economies like that of Nepal? What implications
does the progressive marketetization of the productive sphere and dichotomization
of the productive and reproductive roles of the individuals have for gender
relations and for women’s reproductive roles? These questions will
be examined using a model that views economic processes in terms of closely
inter-related five/six sphere model. Five spheres conceptualized are household
maintenance and human reproduction, household –level subsistence
production, local wage and income producing work, and the national\international
migration. The relationships between economic processes in these successive
spheres and in particular the impact of these relationships on women’s
power in the domestic and wider social and political domains is explored
using a statistical data base from ongoing and existing studies and a
small in-depth field revisit of two villages, surveyed in 1976/77, urban
workers in a few export non-export industries, a few women migrant workers-
who have worked overseas. This research, focusing on subsistence economies,
is expected to provide new perspective on the issues under investigation,
as most of the current literature on such issues does not focus on the
links between the micro and macro processes involved and many of them
are more concerned about the withdrawal of the state than about the effects
of deeper market penetration in the hinter lands itself.
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