Embedding Care and Unpaid Work in Macroeconomic Modeling: AStructuralist Approach

Abstract

This study embeds paid and unpaid care work in a structuralist macroeconomic model. Care work is formally modeled as a gendered input into the market production process via its impact on the current and future labor force, with altruistic motivations determining both how much support people give one another and the economic effectiveness of that support. This study uses the model to distinguish between two types of economies-a "selfish" versus an "altruistic" economyand seeks to understand how different macroeconomic conditions and events play out in the two cases. Whether and how women and men share the financial and time costs of care condition the results of the comparison, with more equal sharing of care responsibilities making the "altruistic" case more likely.

Engendering Macroeconomic Theory and Policy

“…( 2)where S is saving, T is taxes, M is imports, I is business spending, G is government spending, and X is exports. To "engender" a macroeconomic model in this way refers to the modeling of macroeconomic aggregates so as to capture the impact of a change in relative female/male well-being (such as wages or access to credit) (Braunstein 2000;Blecker and Seguino 2002;Seguino 2010;Braunstein, van Staveren, and Tavani 2011).…”

“…A new vein of research has emerged to explore the role of social reproduction in influencing growth (Braunstein, van Staveren, and Tavani 2011;Braunstein 2015). The analytical emphasis is on how the distributions of production and reproduction among women, men, and capital determine investment and growth and how gender inequality is both cause and consequence of these relationships.…”

Think tank—Not fair, not enough, not good enough: Searching for answers to the care crisis

“…The ethics of care puts the need to value contributions made by caregivers firmly on the agenda. It is also a framework that challenges the foundations of liberal economic thinking, since an ethics of care emphasizes the importance of empathy (Bigo & Gray, ; Braunstein, Van Staveren & Tavani, ). As such, it does not sit well with the methodological individualism of orthodox economic theory, which views economic agents acting in a self‐interested, atomistic fashion.…”

Gendered perspectives on economic growth and development in sub-Saharan Africa

“…For fully developed engendered macro models of this genre, seeBraunstein (2000),Blecker and Seguino (2002),and Braunstein et al (2011).…”