This guide provides governments, procuring entities and other stakeholders with a deeper understanding of the challenges faced by women-owned businesses to participate in public procurement markets - offers tools to address these challenges and stimulate increased entrepreneurial activity by women owned businesses; provides a brief overview of the public procurement objectives of public procurement systems; highlights common challenges faced by women-owned businesses in public procurement markets and discusses techniques to address them; reviews affirmative action policies and programmes to build the capacity of women-owned businesses and to encourage their participation in public procurement; discusses metrics, monitoring and evaluating progress towards policy objectives, as well as enforcing compliance with preferential procurement policies; includes bibliographical references

This report finds legal and regulatory barriers to women’s economic inclusion have decreased over the past 50 years globally, but many laws still hinder women’s participation in the economy. Laws restricting women’s economic activity are currently most prevalent in the Middle East and North Africa, Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. The third in a series, Women, Business and the Law 2014: Removing Restrictions to Enhance Gender Equality monitors regulations affecting women entrepreneurs and employees in 143 economies. This edition highlights reforms carried out over the past two years, examines the evolution of women’s property rights and legal decision making ability since 1960 and expands coverage to examine legal protections addressing violence against women.

The OECD, WTO and UNCTAD have provided new metrics and will extend their work to better assess the impact of GVCs on trade, investment, development, growth and jobs. The message from on-going work presented in this report is clear: Global value chains are the consequence of and depend upon open markets, and need to be complemented with appropriate policy frameworks including for strengthening of productive capacities. The fragmentation of production in GVCs should also be accompanied by at least a changed emphasis in trade and investment policies which takes more actively into account the growing interdependence between policy stances of exporters and importers, host countries and home countries. Moreover, ambitious economic integration agreements that more coherently cover all dimensions of market access (not least access to key inputs) can help countries to maximise the gains from production sharing. At the same time, open and stable trade and investment policies need to be accompanied by a range of other sound policies to pave the way for any economy to access, and benefit from, those value chains.

The expansion of international trade has been essential to development and reducing poverty but the relationship between economic growth, poverty reduction and trade is not a simple one. This publication looks into this relationship and examines the challenges poor people face in benefiting from trade opportunities. Written jointly by the World Bank Group and the World Trade Organization, the publication examines trade and poverty across four dimensions: rural poverty; the informal economy; the impact of fragility and conflict; and gender. The publication looks at how trade could make a greater contribution to ending poverty through increasing efforts to lower trade costs, improve the enabling environment, implement trade policy in conjunction with other areas of policy, better manage risks faced by the poor, and improve data used for policy-making. This report has three key messages: 1) A sustained effort to deepen economic integration and further lower trade costs is essential for ending poverty. 2) Lowering tariffs and non-tariff barriers between countries are essential elements of this agenda, but this must form part facing the extreme poor, and for many, their disconnection from markets, if they are to benefit from trade. 3) The World Trade Organization and World Bank Group have made substantial contributions to trade and poverty reduction. However, a great deal more remains to be done to end poverty, and both institutions and other partners need to continually review their activities to support poverty reduction to ensure they remain relevant in an ever-changing world.

The gender gap in employment is the highest globally in the MENA region, with the unemployment rate of young women exceeding that of men by over 20%. In many parts of the region, the more educated one is the more likely he/she is to be unemployed. This underscores the need to address the supply of jobs for educated youth through private sector development and reform. For the MENA region, only Qatar, Bahrain and the UAE fall in the top 50 in terms of labour market efficiency, which includes indicators that account for cooperation between employers and employees, wage determination, female participation in the workforce and a country’s ability to develop and attract talent.