Feminist Perspectives on Care and Macroeconomic Modeling: Introduction to the Special Issue

ABSTRACT

Macroeconomic models and associated policy analyses have long focused exclusively on market production, ignoring gender and care. Decades of feminist economic research, policy analysis, and activism around gender, care, and unpaid work have provided strong intellectual foundations for redressing this lacuna. This special issue represents the collaborative theoretical modeling work of a multidisciplinary group formed to respond to that gap. This introduction to the special issue situates this work in the wider gender and macroeconomics literature, beginning with some notes on the role of mathematical modeling in feminist economics. A key conclusion that emerges from this introductory review is that while some polices, especially greater public funding of care needs, can alleviate the inequities embedded in the gendered provision of care, more equitable and sustainable development and growth are unlikely to result without a transformation of the systems of gender stratification that underlie care provisioning.

HIGHLIGHTS

• Macroeconomic models and policymaking should center the economic and social contributions of caregivers.

• Care and unpaid work are fundamental to the functioning of the market economy.

• A transformation of the systems of gender stratification that underlie care provisioning is needed.

• No single solution exists, but macroeconomic models of care provide steps toward fixing gender inequities in care provisioning.

KEYWORDS:

• Economic modeling
• feminist economics
• care
• macroeconomics

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The authors would like to thank Matthew Templeton for capable research assistance in drafting this introduction to the special issue. We would also like to thank Maria Floro and Elizabeth King for their vision and leadership of the Care Work and the Economy project, as well as the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation for their support of the project. Thanks also to our colleagues in the project for their participation, feedback, and insight.

Notes

1 See, for example, the World Bank Group’s Gender Equality Strategy (2015) and the IMF’s (2022) strategy for mainstreaming gender.

2 “Build back batter” was first recognized as a strategy in the UN’s Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction, agreed to by member states in 2015 (United Nations 2015). The sentiment has since been widely adopted in policy platforms responding to the pandemic, including by the Biden Administration in the US.

3 The project, an initiative of the Program in Gender Analysis in Economics (PGAE) in the Department of Economics at American University (https://research.american.edu/careworkeconomy/https://research.american.edu/careworkeconomy/), was led by Maria S. Floro and Elizabeth King. Its work was generously supported by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.

4 For an in-depth critical review of the gender and macro literature, see Seguino (2020).

5 For recent overviews of heterodox macro modeling, see Robert A. Blecker and Mark Setterfield (2019) and Duncan K. Foley, Thomas R. Michl, and Daniele Tavani (2019).

6 The authors say that this stimulus to private investment could possibly be offset by a sufficient increase in public debt that would raise interest rates (not explicitly modeled) and thereby crowd-out investment. However, given the set-up of their model, this seems likely to be more of a problem in the long run (next period) than the short run (same period).

7 The stability condition requires that “the elasticity of the self-employed sector price to wage-labor sector output must be greater than that of the wage-labor sector output to [the] self-employed sector price” (Vasudevan and Raghavendra 2022: 70).

8 These stresses include the reductions in women’s self-care that occur when women bear most of the burden of unpaid care, as incorporated in the model of Vasudevan and Raghavendra (2022).

9 Presumably, the woman’s “leisure” or non-working time could include her own self-care, as discussed by Vasudevan and Raghavendra (2022). Similarly, one could consider that “home production” includes care of other dependents such as children, which is not explicitly included in the model.

10 Note this is the exact opposite of the Malthusian law of population, in which it is low incomes that depress fertility (and increase mortality).

11 One would expect that the ratio of active labor force to population would decline in such societies, but the authors treat this ratio as an exogenous constant.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.

Notes on contributors

Robert A. Blecker

Robert A. Blecker is Professor of Economics at American University (AU), Washington, DC, and Affiliated Faculty of AU’s School of International Service and Center for Latin American and Latino Studies. His most recent book (co-authored with Mark Setterfield) is Heterodox Macroeconomics: Models of Demand, Distribution and Growth (Edward Elgar Publishing Ltd., 2019). His research includes work on open economy macroeconomics, gendered macro models, international trade theory and policy, economic integration in North America, global trade imbalances, the Mexican economy, North–South trade, and export-led growth.

Elissa Braunstein

Elissa Braunstein is Professor and Chair of the Department of Economics at Colorado State University in Fort Collins, as well as Editor for the journal Feminist Economics. She is also a former Senior Economist for the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) in Geneva, Switzerland. Her work focuses on the international and macroeconomic aspects of growth and development, with particular emphasis on the interactions between macroeconomic policy and gender equality, as well as the consequences of incorporating care and social reproduction into macroeconomic models.