Enter the world? The impacts of the Mercosur-EU agreement on women in Argentina

Abstract

The discussion about globalization and the opening of economies is a relevant topic within Feminist Economics. Faced with the uncritical position of the advantages of women's labor insertion in global value chains in commercial integration processes, Feminist Economics focuses not only on the issue of the number of jobs, but also on their conditions and more fundamentally in the impact on the distribution of care tasks and the deterioration of living conditions that this type of agreement can have. In this article, we present a series of impacts that, in this sense, the Mercosur-Europe Union free trade agreement, already signed, although not yet implemented, will have.

Because the agreement has not yet been implemented, it is not possible to analyze its effective impact. However, in this document, we present a series of indicators on different dimensions that will potentially differentially affect women in Argentina if the agreement comes into force. The dimensions that we analyze are on the one hand, employment through the analysis of the textile sector and the public sector, and on the other the social organization of care at two levels: i) at a macro level, the provision of social services and the provision of social infrastructure for care and ii) at the micro level, the effects on food prices and medicine prices