Globalization, female employment, and regional differences in OECD countries

Accounting for within-country spatial differences is a much neglected issue in many cross-country comparisons. This paper highlights this importance in this empirical analysis of the impact of a country’s degree of social and economic globalization on female employment in 33 OECD countries, using a pseudo micro panel on 110’000 persons from the World Values Survey, 1981 to 2008. A traditional cross-country analysis suggests that only the social dimension of globalization, the worldwide information exchange, increases employment probabilities of women. However, when accounting for sub-national regional differences, the social dimension of globalization appears to work at the regional level only, while economic globalization (trade) increases female employment in a cross-country fashion.