Washington - Rich nations should hire women from developing economies in a bid to break a WTO deadlock on cross-border movement of professional service providers, a World Bank study says.
Industrialised nations are reluctant to accept migrants from developing economies such as nurses and IT workers as part of proposals under the General Agreement on Trade in Services, or GATS, saying they fear the workers might overstay.
But a 218-page report by three World Bank economists said that as women were less likely to overstay than men, the rich nations could hire them for a start.
"It's quite an innovative proposal but requires more rigorous research," Mirja Sjoblom, one of the authors of the study with the bank's development research group, told AFP.
The report released last week also described fears of host countries that migrants from developing economies might overstay as "highly exaggerated."
Host-country governments could impose strict regulations that would "dramatically" reduce the likelihood of overstaying, including forbidding foreign firms whose employees fail to leave when their contract expires or levying large fines on the errant firms, the study said.
Under negotiations on the so called "Mode IV" of the GATS at the Doha Round of the World Trade Organisation, developing nations have been pushing for an ambitious plan for more of their nationals to enter higher-wage developed countries as service providers on a temporary basis.
But the negotiations have not advanced so far because the rich host countries maintain migrants might overstay.
The World Bank study said however that the move in the WTO "might constitute a powerful mechanism for the empowerment of women."
Demand for services
Developed countries' demand for a number of services that are traditionally intensive in female labour is growing rapidly and include domestic service as nannies or maids, and work as nurses in health care centres and in private homes, the report said.
Three advantages were cited in exporting female rather than male labour intensive services:
Women tend to be more attached to their family and are therefore more likely than men to return home at the end of the contract period.
The types of jobs that are intensive in female migrant labour, such as nannies and maids, are likely to enable the more educated native-born women in the destination countries to enter the labour force.
Female migrants themselves would benefit under the "mode IV" arrangement as compared to the standard temporary migration agreements, reducing the likelihood of their abuse by employers.
The study said an "experiment" promoting the temporary migration of workers in female-intensive services could prove to be a useful way to test how well the policy works.
"Trade in male worker-intensive services under Mode IV might be considered at a later stage," it said.
Liberalising trade in services is a key goal of the current Doha Development round of WTO talks aimed at making the international trading system generate more benefits to developing countries.
One study estimates that, if the OECD rich countries admitted enough migrants to increase their labour forces by three per cent, global GDP would rise by about $150bn to $350bn.
This is far more than what the developing nations get from the so-called Official Development Assistance of the rich nations.
But some experts warned of a brain drain in developing nations if GATS made it easier for service providers to cross borders and if some of these professional migrants stayed abroad.
- AFP