Women across countries and regions face many obstacles that hamper their capacity to fully benefit from international trade and, more generally, from their participation in the economy. Those shortcomings are also found in the least-developed countries (LDCs), but they are magnified by persistent and acute development challenges that include high levels of poverty, deficient infrastructure, limited productive capacities, and a mostly low-skilled labour force. Trade has been singled out as an effective tool for a fruitful integration of the LDCs into the global economy, and preferential trade regimes have been set up to facilitate the process. However, have LDCs benefited from such regimes and, above all, has trade provided meaningful opportunities for women’s economic empowerment? This chapter will try to provide an answer to these questions. First, it will look at underlying factors that play a role in determining women’s likelihood to participate in trade and benefit from it, including women’s level of education, time availability, agency, and participation in the labour market. Second, it will explore the role women play and the gendered obstacles they face in the female-intensive sectors of agriculture, artisanal and small-scale mining, Export Processing Zones (EPZs), and tourism. The chapter will then suggest measures that would help women benefit more from their participation in these sectors and highlight the overall economic and societal benefits that this would imply. The measures identified as being potentially beneficial to women will be checked against measures that have been put in place by the LDCs through rescue packages. This will allow a preliminary assessment of the matching between what women would need, especially in a post-pandemic environment, and what so far has been provided to them.

International migration is a relative newcomer on the “trade and” agenda and has hitherto received relatively little attention in trade and migration studies alike. The inclusion of labour migration as one essential mode of cross-border trade in services, so-called Mode 4 in the GATS, opened the agenda for more far-reaching developments at the level of regional and bilateral free-trade agreements . This chapter shows that this deepening of the trade-migration nexus is intricately linked to power shifts in the global economy and the rise of regionalism. For the international trade regime in 2025, this means that, in combination with the ongoing power transitions, the trade-related mobility agenda is likely to expand beyond what the former sponsors of the GATS agreement, the European Union (EU) and the United States, originally intended.

The total share of foreign direct investment (FDI) flows to least developed countries (LDCs) remains very low and is often focused on resource extraction. Whereas most studies have focused on host countries’ measures to attract FDI, this chapter instead focuses on what the development partners of LDCs can do to promote and facilitate more quality and sustainable FDI to LDCs, either directly or indirectly. Direct support measures support outward FDI, such as financing programs and risk management instruments. Indirect support include support for improving the investment climate or the negotiation of international investment agreements. This chapter suggests certain avenues and likely scenarios that assist the customizations of home country measures (HCMs) to work for LDCs. For example, while it is laudable that home country governments support their firms to invest in LDCs, this may distort competition among foreign investors but also domestic firms in the similar sector. Support measures can also be designed conditional upon investor’s compliance with certain criteria of sustainable and responsible investment, such as technology transfer, climate protection, and respect for human rights.