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ABSTRACT
Concerns about women’s work were present at the advent of the modern method of national income accounting, and they have featured prominently in the most radical critiques of this method. During and after the Second World War, Phyllis Deane, a young researcher working under the supervision of Richard Stone, Austin Robinson and Arthur Lewis, grappled with the conceptual difficulties involved in measuring the ‘national’ incomes of mostly rural subsistence colonies in British central Africa. In constructing her estimates, Deane relied heavily on a multidisciplinary survey of nutrition conducted in interwar Nyasaland. Deane’s work was essentially an exercise in reductionism and bounding; she sought to extract from these data a single monetary estimate of production. Yet Deane also proved unwilling to exclude too much. She broke with her advisors’ favoured convention that activities not involved in market exchange should be excluded from the national income. Successive national income accountants around the world would reach disparate conclusions on method, particularly on the question of the ‘production boundary’—that is, the dividing line between those productive activities that would be included in the national income and those that would not. This issue became most contentious in the sphere of ‘non-monetary’ or ‘subsistence’ production performed mostly by female producers. While some statisticians included firewood collection, beer brewing and cooking, many others thought such activities beyond the bounds of ‘the economy’. Early decisions about the status of non-monetary production influenced the international standards enshrined in the United Nations System of National Accounts, first published in 1953. Beginning in the 1970s, second-wave feminists criticised the invisibility of women’s work in national income estimates. These critiques helped spur the inclusion of non-monetary activities in the accounts of many nations. Yet by the 1990s, many feminist critics—most notably New Zealand-born political economist Marilyn Waring—sought to move beyond GDP as a measure of welfare. These feminists called instead for greater reliance on measures such as the Human Development Index and time-use surveys. These measures may have appeared new, but they required the same multidisciplinary and intensive methods as Nyasaland’s interwar nutrition survey, which had served as the substrate for the earliest calculation of a ‘colonial national’ income. Drawing upon archives in the United Kingdom, Malawi and the United States, this paper argues that feminist economists and women’s work were central to both the post-war construction and the late-twentieth century critique of national income.
Acknowledgements
This paper has benefited from the comments of two anonymous reviewers. I would also like to thank the organisers of the Johns Hopkins African History Seminar, the 2014 annual meeting of the US African Studies Association, the 2016 New York Area African History Workshop and the Institute for New Economic Thinking Young Scholars’ Initiative, where earlier versions of portions of this paper were presented. Projit Mukharji, Steven Feierman, Mary Morgan, Jeremy Greene, Gerardo Serra, Jane Guyer, Rosanna Dent and Allegra Giovine provided helpful comments. The archivists at the Malawi National Archives, the UK National Archives, the University of Cambridge archives, the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine archives and the archives of the United Nations Secretariat provided assistance in locating primary source materials.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. Stiglitz, Sen and Fitoussi, Mismeasuring Our Lives.
2. Mitchell, Rule of Experts.
3. Morgan, ‘Seeking Parts’.
4. Speich, ‘Travelling with the GDP’; Ward, Quantifying the World; Coyle, GDP.
5. Jerven, Poor Numbers; Jerven, ‘Users and Producers’.
6. Berry, Before the Wind of Change.
7. Brantley, Feeding Families, 4–5.
8. Carpenter, Beriberi.
9. Brantley, Feeding Families, 7–9.
10. Unlike most of the male members of the team (e.g. Fitzmaurice, Platt, Berry and Kettlewell), Barker and Read were not members of the Colonial Service when they joined the survey team. Yet they were both well-established scholars already working in Nyasaland. Read had been awarded a research fellowship by the International African Institute to study the impact of male migrant labour on the women and children who remained in Nyasaland. Barker had been in Nyasaland for over a year before the start of the survey, after having worked in the United Kingdom on urban surveys for the famed nutrition researcher John Boyd Orr. See Berry, Before the Wind of Change, 96. Also see Whitehead, ‘Read, Margaret Helen’.
11. Brantley, Feeding Families, 9.
12. Ibid., 4–5.
13. Ibid., 10.
14. Berry and Petty, Nyasaland Survey Papers.
15. Brantley, Feeding Families, 107. Berry and Petty, Nyasaland Survey Papers, 13.
16. Brantley, Feeding Families, 100.
17. Ibid., 71–73.
18. Berry and Petty, Nyasaland Survey Papers, 138.
19. Keynes, How to Pay.
20. Robinson, ‘Foreword, v.
21. Meade and Stone, ‘The Construction of Tables’.
22. Keynes, The General Theory.
23. Petty, Verbum Sapienti.
24. Quesnay, Tableau Économique.
25. Bowley and Stamp, ‘The National Income, 1924’, 376–78.
26. Clark, The National Income, 1924–31.
27. Kuznets, National Income, 1929–1932.
28. Lindahl, Dahlgren and Kock, National Income of Sweden.
29. Meade and Stone, ‘The Construction of Tables’, 216.
30. Robinson, ‘Foreword’, v.
31. The wartime mobilisation had generated a demand for trained economists, lowering (at least temporarily) the barriers women faced in securing important posts in economic research institutions: another young female investigator, Phyllis Ady, held a fellowship from the Colonial Research Council to measure the national income of the Gold Coast. Fortes, Steel and Ady, ‘Ashanti Survey, 1945–46’, 149–77.
32. Robinson, ‘Foreword’, v.
33. Ibid., vii–viii. Robinson also explained that the geographic contiguity of Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland also seemed to present the opportunity for cross-checking individual estimates. Aside from the survey data, Deane relied on data provided in written correspondence with officials and settlers in the colonies.
34. A seemingly arbitrary substitution of ‘colony’ and ‘nation’ is evident throughout Deane’s writings on national income accounting in colonial settings.
35. Deane, Measurement of Colonial Incomes, 20–21.
36. As the economist Arthur Cecil Pigou famously quipped in 1920, ‘if a man marries his housekeeper or his cook, the national dividend is diminished’. See Pigou, Economics of Welfare.
37. These women’s groups and a few male statisticians argued (unsuccessfully) that married women working in family enterprises or providing domestic services were ‘occupied’, and that their classification as dependants helped justify lower wages. Much of the impetus for this change came from the mid-nineteenth-century ‘cult of domesticity’ (which banished the logic of economic interest from the moral realm of the home), the rise in male labour outside the household and the insistence of male trade unionists on their roles as the family’s sole breadwinners. Folbre, ‘The Unproductive Housewife’, 463–84.
38. Goldschmidt-Clermont, ‘Economic Measurement’, 279–99.
39. Prest and Stewart, National Income of Nigeria.
40. Deane, Colonial Social Accounting.
41. Deane, Measurement of Colonial Incomes, 20–21.
42. Ibid., 20–21.
43. Deane, ‘Measuring National Income’, 155.
44. See Colonial Research Fellowships, Plans and Reports of Miss P.M. Deane on problems of national income measurement in Northern and Southern Rhodesia, Nyasaland and South Africa, CO 927/17/4 and CO 927/17/5 (1946–1948), The National Archives, Kew (hereafter TNA). During these years, the broader mission of the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute was to understand the impact of broader political and economic forces on village life. See Englund, ‘Extreme Poverty and Existential Obligations’, 33–50.
45. Deane, ‘National Income’, 34.
46. Deane, ‘Problems of Surveying’, 44.
47. ‘Village Economic Surveying in Central Africa’, Colonial Research Fellowships, Plans and Reports of Miss P. M. Deane, 28 Oct. 1948, CO 927/17/5, TNA.
48. Deane, Colonial Social Accounting, 281.
49. Ibid., 262.
50. Ibid., 120.
51. Cooper, Africa since 1940; Constantine, Making of British Colonial Development Policy.
52. The Cambridge economists could be quite effusive in describing the virtues of their method of national income accounting. When Deane’s preliminary report was published in 1948, Austin Robinson wrote of the utility and moral necessity of colonial accounting: ‘To my mind,’ he explained, ‘an estimate of the national income is the necessary beginning of a serious economic study of any country … What do we really know today about the standards of life of the millions in the colonial empire for whose welfare we are responsible?’ Robinson, ‘Foreword’, x.
53. Alexander Loveday, Letter to Richard Stone, 14 June 1945, JRNS 5/1, King’s College Library, University of Cambridge.
54. ‘Measurement of National Income.’
55. System of National Accounts, 1953.
56. Ibid.
57. Ibid., 5.
58. In later writings, Richard and Giovanna Stone offered a more pragmatic reason for the SNA’s exclusion of ‘household and amateur activities’. They explained: ‘This treatment is not a matter of principle but convenience … Attempts to extend the production boundary by valuing household and amateur activities come up against an almost complete lack of information.’ This is the same problem that Deane had encountered in making her own estimates of colonial national income, and was the impetus for her field studies in Nyasaland and Northern Rhodesia. But, whereas Deane (and later Marilyn Waring) saw this lack of data as a fundamental problem in national income that demanded immediate remedy, Richard and Giovanna Stone presented it more as a curiosity to be solved at some later date. Stone and Stone, National Income and Expenditure, 30–31.
59. League of Nations Committee of Statistical Experts. Report of the Sub-Committee on National Income Statistics. Princeton, NJ, JRNS 5/1, Richard Stone Papers, King’s College, University of Cambridge, April 1946. Another woman, Miss Agatha Chapman, economist on the staff of the Bank of Canada, was present and participated in the discussions, but she was not a member of the sub-committee.
60. System of National Accounts, 1993, xliv–xlv.
61. Kneeland, ‘Women on Farms’.
62. Mód, ‘Social Stratification in Hungary’.
63. ‘United Nations Statistical Commission, Report of the 14th Session’, 17, United Nations, New York, 1966, Box S-1003-0030, Folder 1, United Nations Archive and Records Management Section.
64. Mód, ‘Relation’, 129–31.
65. The 1953 SNA argued it was impractical to devise a more complex and comprehensive means of measuring national income: ‘The actual construction of such a comprehensive accounting system is hardly possible at the present time. Nor, given the practical needs and resources, should it be the immediate objective of economic statisticians engaged in this field.’ System of National Accounts, 1953.
66. Blades, ‘Subsistence Activities’, 391–410.
67. Jerven, ‘Users and Producers’, 180.
68. Ibid., 178.
69. Ibid., 180.
70. The devaluation of non-monetary production in the SNA found allies in prominent modernisation theorists like Arthur Lewis, who argued in 1954 that the central dynamic of development involved moving subsistence farmers into industrial production. Incompletely captured or undervalued subsistence production led national income to rise simply as a result of the (much-prophesied) transition from non-monetary to monetary production without any increase in real aggregate production. According to Daniel Speich, by the early 1960s many of the ascendant modernisation theorists providing technical assistance on national income around the world argued that ‘it did not really matter whether the instrument visualised economic growth or merely market integration, as both processes were thought to be intrinsic to development’. See Speich, ‘Traveling with the GDP’; Lewis, ‘Economic Development’, 139–91.
71. SNA Expert Group Meeting, Notes, 2 Dec. 1964, JRNS 5/3, Richard Stone Papers, King’s College, University of Cambridge..
72. Malawi National Accounts Report, 1964-67, 7, Government of Malawi, Zomba, 1968, Malawi National Archives..
73. For a sense of the environmental debate over the SNA during the 1970s, see Drechsler, ‘Problems of Recording’, 239–52. For a longer history of this discourse, see Hecht, ‘National Environmental Accounting’, 3–66.
74. Konkel, ‘Monetization of Global Poverty’, 276–300. Konkel demonstrates that this was not a sudden rupture, but instead a gradual shift.
75. Seers, ‘What Are We Trying to Measure?’
76. Kapur, Lewis and Webb, The World Bank, 215–30. Also see International Labour Office, Employment, Growth and Basic Needs.
77. Federici, Wages Against Housework. The resonance of this campaign might be attributable, in part, to rising rates of female labour-force participation in wealthy countries during this era. The burgeoning substitution of market transactions for previously unpaid household labour (laundry, child care, food preparation) might have helped to draw elite attention towards the value of such labour. See Presser, ‘Can We Make Time for Children?’, 523–43.
78. Meillassoux, Maidens, Meal and Money.
79. Boserup, Woman’s Role in Economic Development.
80. In this study, a ‘developing country’ was any country that received development aid from the members of the Development Assistance Committee (DAC) of the OECD. It included countries in Southern Europe while excluding poorer nations in the ‘communist bloc’. See Blades, Non-Monetary (Subsistence) Activities.
81. ‘Report to the Economic and Social Council on the Fifteenth Session of the Statistical Commission, Held at the UN Headquarters from 28 February to 8 March 1968’, Draft, Statistical Commission, 5 March 1968, Box S-1003-0030, Folder 1, United Nations Archive and Records Management Section..
82. Blades, ‘Subsistence Activities’, 396.
83. See, for instance, Ramirez, ‘The Global Kitchen’.
84. Waring, Counting for Nothing, 1988, 6, 39.
85. Ibid., 5–6.
86. Eisner had made similar proposals in academic papers since the 1970s. See Eisner, Misunderstood Economy, 21–25. For his earlier work, see Eisner, ‘Total Incomes’, 41–70.
87. Joann Vanek, former director of social statistics at the United Nations, believes Waring’s influence stemmed from the detail of her critique: ‘She demystified the national accounts. Many feminists had taken pot shots at national accounts, but Marilyn went into the body of it and disaggregated the specific assumptions that were made and how that really shaped what ended up being a bias against women.’
See Terje, ‘Women Unaccounted For’.
88. System of National Accounts, 1993, 6.19, 6.20, 21.46, 21.47. In a letter to Stone Nancy Ruggles, Secretary of the International Association for Research in Income and Wealth, explained that Derek Blades was one of the earliest participants in planning for the next iteration of the SNA. The letter does not, however, explain Blades’ ideas for the production boundary. See Nancy Ruggles, Letter to Richard Stone, 27 July 1985, JRNS 5/6, Richard Stone Papers, King’s College, University of Cambridge.
89. Goldschmidt-Clermont and Pagnossin-Aligisakis, ‘Households’ non-SNA Production’, 519–29.
90. Waring, Counting for Nothing, 1999.
91. Ibid., xxvii. Today many of the feminists who advocated ‘Wages for Housework’ in the 1970s are calling instead for a ‘basic citizens’ income’—an unconditional, non-means-tested payment from the state to every man, woman and child. For more political discourse on basic income in the Global South, see Ferguson, Give a Man a Fish.
92. Waring, Counting for Nothing, 1988, 233.
93. Waring, Counting for Nothing, 1999, xxxi.
94. Ibid.
95. In contrast to the Nyasaland Nutrition Survey data (), Waring’s time-use surveys invariably showed women spending more time on work than men. The disparity is explained in large part by the fact that Waring’s charts included time spent on cooking. See Who’s Counting?
96. System of National Accounts, 2008, 6–7. The exceptions to the exclusion of services produced for household consumption are: ‘services produced by employing paid domestic staff’ and ‘the own-account production of housing services by owner-occupiers’. Perhaps because of the controversy surrounding the 1968 SNA revisions, the 1993 and 2008 revisions were not attributed to a specific ‘Expert Group’, but rather to an ‘Inter-Secretariat Working Group on National Accounts’ that ostensibly coordinated the input of a number of international organisations, including the Statistical Office of the European Communities (Eurostat), the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the United Nations Statistical Division and regional commissions of the United Nations Secretariat, and the World Bank. Still, the ISWGNA did have ‘senior level representatives’ from each organisation. For the 2008 SNA, these were: Pieter Everaers and Laurs Norlund (Eurostat); Carol S. Carson and Robert Edwards (IMF); Enrico Giovannini (OECD), Willem de Vries and Paul Cheung (United Nations Statistical Division); Shaida Badiee (World Bank), 1.
97. See, for instance, International Labour Office, ‘Statistics of Work’, 10.
98. Fukuda-Parr, ‘The Human Development Paradigm’, 301–17.
99. Klasen, ‘UNDP’s Gender-Related Measures’, 243–74.
100. ‘How to Measure Prosperity’.
101. Milanović, The Haves and the Have-Nots, 26.
102. Terje, ‘Women Unaccounted For’.