Abstract map of the world

June 13-15, I attended the 21st Annual Conference on Global Economic Analysis, held in Cartagena, Colombia, to present and discuss a draft of an early project output, titled “Care in an Aging East Asian Economy: Simulating the impacts of policies on gender roles, labor markets, and household welfare” and coauthored with two CWE Researcher colleagues, Marzia Fontana and Kijong Kim. The purpose of this paper was to take the first steps toward the development and testing of a computable general equilibrium (CGE) model of South Korea that can analyze policies related to care of both young and elderly. The conference was organized by GTAP, the leading global organization for this area of economic analysis, headquartered at Purdue University. While our paper could draw on the emerging literature of gendered CGE models, this may be the first time such a model is used to analyze issues related to care. In the Korean context, this extension is of outmost importance (like the rest of the project) given the challenges posed by a rapidly growing elderly population, a declining population in working age, and low participation of women in market work, which in its turn partly is due to the fact that women provide most of the care needed by other family members. The forthcoming analysis with the model will focus on policies that improve access to affordable, out-of-home, high quality care from private and public service providers. Empirical model simulations will assess the impact of such policies on a wide range of indicators, including gendered time use and the ability of South Korea’s many highly educated women to earn higher incomes from working more outside the home.

This blog was authored by Hans Lofgren

Person in wheel chair with caregiver

The Care Work and Economy project has awarded five research teams funding to produce theoretical gender-aware macromodels that incorporate care in the development context.  Each team contributes to one of two broad macroeconomic themes in terms that also account for care work and gender inequality: 1) growth and employment, and 2) social reproduction and structural change.

Care Work and the Economy is excited to advance our understanding of and ability to effectively model the links between care and standard economic variables and concerns by supporting the following teams and their research:

“Social Reproduction, Gender Inequality and Economic Growth” by Elissa Braunstein (Colorado State University) and Stephanie Seguino (University of Vermont)

Braunstein and Seguino develop an empirically tractable macroeconomic model of social reproduction and economic growth, with applications to the challenges of economic development.  Their paper sheds light on the following questions: does care matter for long-term growth, how do its effects compare to standard growth regressors like investment and education, and does the extent of gender inequality in responsibility for care partly determine the magnitude of these relationships?

Elissa Braunstein is Professor in the Department of Economics at Colorado State University.  In 2015-2017 Braunstein served as Senior Economist at the Division of Globalization and Development Strategies and Officer-in-Charge of the Economic Cooperation and Integration Among Developing Countries unit at the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD). She has a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and a Master’s Degree in Pacific International Affairs from the University of California San Diego.

Stephanie Seguino is Professor in the Department of Economics at the University of Vermont.  She has been an advisor or consultant to numerous international organizations including the World Bank, United Nations Development Program, the Asian Development Bank, and USAID, and publishes regularly in a number of economic journals, including World Development, Journal of Development Studies, and Feminist Economics. Dr. Seguino has also contributed her services to local and global living wage campaigns.

“Long-run Macroeconomics When People are not Exogenous: an overlapping generations approach to fertility, unpaid work, and economic growth” by James Heintz and Nancy Folbre (Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts Amherst)

Heintz and Folbre produce an overlapping generations macro model in which production and investment are redefined to include the contribution of unpaid labor. The paper critically examines the standard macroeconomic definitions of income, production, investment, and savings and propose alternatives that take into account unpaid, non-market labor. It then develops a more realistic set of micro-foundations for macroeconomic modeling that incorporates bargaining power, the distribution of income/wealth, gender dynamics, and the costs of children; explore how transfer payments between men and women, between government and households, and between generations affect fertility choice, investments in children, and macroeconomic outcomes.

James Heintz is Associate Director of the Political Economy Research Institute (PERI) and Andrew Glyn Professor of Economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.  Heintz holds a Ph.D. from the University of Massachusetts and a Master’s Degree from the University of Minnesota. He has written on a wide range of economic policy issues, including job creation, global labor standards, the distributive consequences of macroeconomic policies, and human rights. He has worked on collaborative projects with numerous United Nations agencies, including the International Labour Organization, the U.N. Research Institute for Social Development, the Economic Commission for Africa, the United Nations Development Programme, and UNIFEM.

Nancy Folbre is Director of the Program on Gender and Care Work at PERI and Professor Emerita of Economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. In 1998, she received the MacArthur Foundation genius grant award. Her research explores the interface between political economy and feminist theory, with a particular emphasis on the value of unpaid care work. In addition to numerous articles published in academic journals, she is the editor of For Love and Money: Care Work in the U.S. (Russell Sage, 2012), and the author of Greed, Lust, and Gender: A History of Economic Ideas (Oxford, 2009), Valuing Children: Rethinking the Economics of the Family (Harvard, 2008), and The Invisible Heart: Economics and Family Values (New Press, 2001).

“Financialization and the Care Economy” by Srinivas Raghav (NUI Galway) and Ramaa Vasudevan (Colorado State University)

Raghav and Vasudevan develop a macroeconomic model within the structuralist tradition to explore the linkages between financialization, household debt and unpaid care work.  The team evaluates the implications of the growth of micro-credit and household debt under financialization for the care economy, as well as their repercussions for the wider macroeconomy.

Ramaa Vasudevan is Associate Professor in the Economics department at Colorado State University. Her Ph.D. in economics from New School University, New York, focused on the political economy of international trade and finance, while her M.Phil at the Centre for Development Studies, Trivandrum, India, was a study about the evolution of labor markets in colonial India.  Her main research interests are in international finance, open economy macroeconomics and the political economy of development and finance.

Srinivasan Raghavendran is Lecturer in the Business and Economics department at NUI Galway.  His research is focused on a number of major themes in the areas of Macroeconomics, Finance and Complex Systems, and Political Economy. The broad theme that connects various strands of his research is the issue of the dynamic interrelation between economic growth and distribution of income, and his current work focuses on this question in the context of financialisation. Dr. Raghavendra’s research is interdisciplinary. His research draws inspiration from the intellectual traditions of Michal Kalecki and John Maynard Keynes on the substantive front, and uses the methods and tools of Complex systems, to study the dynamics of growth and income distribution in the modern financial economies. Dr. Raghavendra’s research is underpinned by the principle that economic systems cannot be viewed independently of the wider socio-political context.

“Gendering Macroeconomic Analysis and Development Policy: The role of labour market and fiscal policies for gender equitable development” by Ozlem Onaran, Cem Oyvat and Eurydice Fotopoulou (University of Greenwich)

Onaran, Oyvat, and Fotopoulou develop a post-Keynesian, post-Kaleckian, feminist demand-led growth model to analyze the role of both labor market and fiscal policies in achieving gender equitable sustainable development.

Dr. Onaran is Professor of Economics at the University of Greenwich, UK and the director of the Greenwich Political Economy Research Centre. She has done extensive research on issues of inequality, wage-led growth, employment, globalization, gender, and crises. She has directed research projects for the International Labour Organisation, the Institute for New Economic Thinking, the Foundation of European Progressive Studies, the Vienna Chamber of Labour, the Austrian Science Foundation, and Unions21. She is member of the Policy Advisory Group of the Women’s Budget Group, the Scientific Committee of the Foundation of European Progressive Studies, and Scientific Advisory Board of Hans Boeckler Foundation. She has more than seventy articles in books and peer reviewed journals.

Dr. Cem Oyvat is Lecturer in Economics at the University of Greenwich.  He received his Phd in Economics from University of Massachusetts – Amherst in 2014 with dissertation titled “Essays on the Evolution of Inequality”. His research interests include development economics, macroeconomics, international economics, income distribution and political economy.

Dr. Eurydice Fotopoulou is Lecturer in Economics at Goldsmiths, University of London.  Eurydice’s research focuses on gender and macroeconomics, and in particular structular models that investigate income and wealth distribution inequality. She also works on the impact of labour market and fiscal policies. Her research is interdisciplinary, drawing from economics, sociology and gender studies. Recent collaborative research projects look into the effects of income, gender and wealth inequality, and economic policies on macroeconomic performance.

“Access to infrastructure, women’s time allocation and growth” by Pierre-Richard Agénor (University of Manchester) and Madina Agénor (Harvard University)

Agénor and Agénor develop a stylized model to explore and analyze access to infrastructure, women’s time allocation, and economic growth in developing countries.  Pierre-Richard Agénor is Hallsworth Professor of International Macroeconomics and Development Economics at the University of Manchester. Prior to joining the University of Manchester, Professor Agénor was Lead Economist and Director of the Macroeconomics and Policy Assessment Skills Program at the World Bank.He also served as Senior Economist in the Research Department of the International Monetary Fund. During the academic year 2003-04, he was a Distinguished Visiting Scholar at Yale University.

Dr. Madina Agénor, ScD, MPH is an Assistant Professor of Social and Behavioral Sciences at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health (HSPH). She holds a Doctor of Science (ScD) in Social and Behavioral Sciences from HSPH, a Master of Public Health (MPH) in Sociomedical Sciences from the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health, and a Bachelor of Arts (AB) in Community Health and Gender Studies from Brown University. As a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Harvard Education Program in Cancer Prevention at HSPH and Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, she completed postdoctoral training in social epidemiology, cancer prevention and control, and LGBTQ health.