Women's Empowerment and Socio-Economic Development in MENA Region: Adaptation to Trade Policies and Access to Market for Promoting Entrepreneurship

Introduction

Global interest in the development of female entrepreneurship and exploring policies to support recently increased due to the gender gap in entrepreneurial activity. On the other hand, the under-development of female entrepreneurship represents an untapped potential for prosperity growth. Through entrepreneurial activities, women create jobs, generate income to reduce poverty, achieve economic independence and contribute to sustainable development. Although there is a great, need of creating more favorable conditions for the development and strengthening of women's entrepreneurship. Therefore, policies better designed and funded strong and targeted measures at increasing women's empowerment. Thus, empowering women economically need it is to improve the following goals: increase the rate of entrepreneurship of women who go through improved policies, strengthen the institutional support and establish a public-private dialogue, improve women's access to credit and financial services, improve services business development and reduce gender inequality in access to information and markets.

Unfortunately, in developing world women entrepreneurs tend to face greater obstacles in access to credit due to systemic failures and market knowledge and business needs. In addition, financial institutions and providers of business development do not serve them, and they often lack access to consumer and market opportunities for business networks. Then, the access to market for women entrepreneur and the building of networking relation is constraint by the limits of trade agreements and the constraints of trade policies. In addition, women entrepreneur are facing everywhere the rule and mechanisms of Trade policy at the national level for cross-border trade activities, which is intertwined with domestic fiscal, monetary and labor market policies, and linked to other policies such as foreign aid and investment, structural adjustment, debt and development. Indeed, Trade liberalization entails the deregulation of foreign investment through the reduction of barriers to international trade, such as tariffs. Liberalization also means instituting macroeconomic reforms such as export promotion. Indeed, with trade liberalization, countries are encouraged to specialize in particular goods and services according to their own comparative advantage. Women entrepreneurs are facing trade rules and can participate to the building of comparative advantage and adapt the WTO rules in different sectors.

This chapter is an opportunity to explore the empowerment of women on socio-economic development. Firstly, the Analysis of the theoretical foundations is justifying the role of women as entrepreneur and gender equality in growth and to analysis the limits and constraints of women’s entrepreneurs. Then, it is an opportunity to offer a brief overview about role and importance of women in the socio-economic development in MENA region. Then, is the analysis of actual state of the empowerment of women from the actual state of women in the Universal Millennium Goals and Sustainable Development Goals post-2015. And a comparative analysis is done to explain disparities between determinants of women’s economic empowerment and also between countries. Finally, the question is how to create policies for the business sector to promote the empowerment of women and how they are adopted and implemented for developing countries. Finally, some recommendations are offered to expand economic opportunities for women.