Governments everywhere have ministries dedicated to women's affairs. I know of only one with a Ministry for Women Empowerment: Indonesia. Charged with the 'realization of gender equality and justice' together with children's well-being, the ministry frames gender equality as a matter of justice.Collection: Equality
Technology is making it easier for women to connect to business opportunities around the world. Legal obstacles must not be allowed to stand in their way. That's not just because it's economically smart. It's because discrimination shouldn't be the law.Collection: Legal
Laws matter. With effective implementation and enforcement, good laws can nudge forward positive changes in social and cultural mores.Collection: Positive
Responsive governments committed to improving the broader trade facilitation and business environment can help companies of all sizes by improving infrastructure: roads, transportation, ports, information and communication technology, and electricity.Collection: Communication
Entrepreneurs - both women and men - need equal and fair access to finance - to create new businesses, to reach to new markets, and to adapt to climate change.Collection: Finance
Around the world, it is much more difficult for women than for men to run a successful business. Even when laws are not explicitly biased against them, companies owned and operated by women often face discrimination every step of the way, from obtaining finance to finding customers.Collection: Finance
The social and legal discrimination that relegates hundreds of women to subordinate or marginal economic roles has a huge aggregate cost.Collection: Legal
The fact is that during the post-1989 heyday of globalization optimism, political and business elites did not think enough about the prospect - plainly predicted in economic theory - that trade would harm some people even while leaving society as a whole better off. The result was overpromised benefits and inadequate adjustment plans.
Africans don't just need more jobs: they need better jobs.
Exporting firms are more productive and pay higher wages than their domestically focused counterparts, especially in places like Sub-Saharan Africa. If firms manage to thrive in world markets, they tend to increase their productivity even more.
Japan has huge potential in women - potential, especially in the area of the economy, that Japan is not using fully.
You only have a problem when you admit you have a problem.
We often run the risk, when discussing women empowerment, to think that this is about women talking about women with other women, but this is not the point.
The deeper your regional integration, the more value chain activity you generate, but the more you close the gap between your small and your large companies.
Our key objective is to remove obstacles to trade.
We survey companies and ask them what the barriers to export and import are. Once we map these barriers, we sit down with the companies on one side and the government and regulatory agencies on the other and help them identify obstacles to trade and what has to be done to tackle them.
I have seen African countries negotiate bilaterally and within the WTO. African countries come to the WTO prepared and defend their interests with vigour.
African pressure has led the E.U. to rethink part of its agricultural subsidy programme.
Through the SITA initiative, we are building bridges between India and East Africa by taking Indian companies to these countries to see with their own eyes what the opportunities are.
There are bridges that we have built not only between individual companies but also between associations. This will keep business and investments flowing.
The representatives of young professionals and woman entrepreneurs deserve seats at the big table to evolve viable, efficient, and sustainable solutions for problems the world is faced with. Without their participation, there will always be a deficit of compassion and innovation.
Empowering women with greater income opportunities will lift societies at a much faster rate.
It makes perfect economic sense to integrate women in the economy in the developing world in order to catch up with advanced countries, thereby minimising socioeconomic costs as well.
Our main aim globally is to connect more women to the economy because we know there is a specific market failure there: women are having more difficulty in business than men.
Through e-commerce, women have found a means to jump over cultural and traditional lack of available time for remunerated activities.
The most difficult part of Brexit will be to figure out the trade regime between the U.K. and the rest of the E.U. because the level of trade integration between the members of the E.U. is the deepest in the world and integrates regulations that govern how products and services are produced and sold within the E.U.
I have been talking to trade ministers in various countries who all say that gender inclusivity is important to them. We need to make this importance visible to the rest of the world and catalyse action towards more inclusive trade.
The 'SheTrades' programme aims to connect one million women entrepreneurs to markets by 2020 with a campaign, a focussed networking app, and a range of international and national information resources.
Women are the half of the engine of our societies; they are half of the engines of our economies.
Women are the most underutilized 'resource' in the world economy.
When women are paid for their work and have control over how the money gets spent, they invest much more of their income than men do in their families' education and health.
Trade and investment promotion organizations are crucial partners in ITC's work to enable SMEs to internationalize. They sustain and multiply the impact of trade-related technical support and allow SMEs to function with confidence in any location.
You must stand up for multilateralism. You must make trade great again.
A.P., like the rest of India, has huge potential to move up the value chain by investing in small and medium enterprises to create more value addition and better paid jobs.
ITC looks forward to working with the chief minister and the government of India to ensure trade leads to impact on the ground.
Gender-based job restrictions tend to be associated with wider wage gaps and lower employment rates for women. And where girls' future earning potential is limited, families may choose to send their brothers to school instead.
Governments can't credibly claim to be concerned about stagnant growth and ageing workforces unless they are actively seeking to empower women economically. One way they can speed up progress towards gender-equal economic opportunity is to change laws that are holding women back.
China has proven that the wellbeing of citizens in a country doesn't necessarily contradict its engagement globally.
E-commerce is a powerful means to connect the unconnected to global trade.
While tourism is often resource-intensive, it is a major driver of poverty reduction in developing countries.
The big part of coffee production in many rural areas is in the hands of women. It's women who work in the fields. They harvest the coffee. They wash the coffee. They take the coffee to the market. But when the coffee gets to the market, it's the man who cashes in the money for the crop.
Look at a map of the world: the countries which do not trade much, or which trade only in oil and gas, tend to be in regions which suffer the most social and political instability.
Trade and investment are good for innovation - open economies allow new ideas and technologies to diffuse more quickly from wherever they are created.
Full social and political engagement is impossible without economic empowerment, a point that is as true for women as it is for young people of either gender.
It has been proven through studies by the World Bank and others that companies participating in international trade are more competitive.
Without action to de-carbonize our economies, unchecked climate change threatens to batter lives and economies around the world, hitting the poorest people hardest.
Economic policy that adheres to the tenets of orthodoxy while failing to deliver for large sections of society is doomed to fail.
The tourism industry has considerable potential to be a sustainability role model in its role as a buyer of goods and other services, from building materials and green construction standards to farm produce.
Growth without diversification, technological improvement, and increased productivity is easily reversed: all it takes is a dip in commodity prices.
Companies that operate across borders have the expertise SMEs need. Who better to help smallholder farmers navigate complex sustainability standards than the companies who demand - or set - them?