Acknowledgements
This book is the product of many who persevered over many months to see it to its successful conclusion. First, we would like to thank the authors of this volume for their valuable contributions, without which the global perspective represented would not have been possible. We would also like to thank Vineet Hegde and Pieter Van Vaerenbergh for their excellent assistance with editing and formatting the manuscript. Our heartfelt thanks to the WTO Director-General Dr Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala for her global leadership on women’s empowerment issues, generally, and her unequivocal support, in particular, for this project. We express gratitude to her and to the other heads of Geneva-based trade organizations – UNCTAD and ITC – for contributing to this book’s Foreword. We acknowledge, with warmth, the continuous support provided by our respective universities – the University of the West Indies, Cave Hill Campus, the University of Chile, and the Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México (ITAM, Mexico) – and the financing generously offered by the WTO Chairs Programme, the WTO Trade and Gender Unit and the University of Chile. Through that funding, we have been able to publish this book as an open-access resource and thereby guarantee that it can be widely disseminated and shared. Finally, we note that, as WTO Chairs of the Americas, we would not have been able to collaborate on this project without the platform provided through the WTO Chairs Programme and the WTO Secretariat team servicing it.