Intensive Course in Gender-Sensitive Macroeconomic Modeling for Policy Analysis

Day 12: Micro modeling of Policy Interventions and a Primer on GEM-Care

Session 12.1 Levy Macro-Micro Model (Part 4): Micro modeling of Policy Interventions II–Time Use Impacts

Instructors: Ajit Zacharias and Thomas Masterson

Topics

The social and physical infrastructure investments we model have both direct and indirect impacts on time use. The direct impacts are reduced required household production hours for households whose children enroll in new pre-K programs and reduced travel times (to work and market) for those living in areas with improved roads. The indirect impacts result from the reshuffling of responsibilities for household production within households affected by employment changes. 

Main Reading

Zacharias et al. (2019), Chapter 4, sections 4.1, 4.2, 4.3.1 

Session 12.2 A Primer on GEM-Care: Introducing SAM for GEM-Care

Instructor: Martín Cicowiez

Topics

GEM-Care is a gendered dynamic CGE model designed for country-level policy analysis focusing on issues relevant to the requirements of care and gender analysis. It has benefitted from the literature on gendered CGE modeling. GEM-Care is a multi-purpose template model. While it includes specific features important to its focus, it can address a broader range of topics typically relevant for CGE analysis, including growth, fiscal space, external shocks, poverty, and inequality. The dynamics of the model are recursive: actors are assumed to be myopic, making decisions based on data for the current year, which are influenced by past decisions. The small but growing literature on gendered SAM-based CGE models has demonstrated the ability of the CGE approach to generate important insights about gender-differentiated effects of economic policies. This section briefly surveys major contributions, taking note of their structure, data needs, and policy coverage. It also situates the model and analysis of this paper in the context of this literature, discusses some of the features of the proposed model, and takes note of some of the outstanding challenges for gender-sensitive CGE modeling. The gendered CGE models may be split into two groups. The first introduces a gender disaggregation of labor in the production sphere that, according to the System of National Accounts (SNA), is part of GDP. The second group goes beyond GDP by extending the model to cover household service production for own consumption, also in this sphere with a gender disaggregation of labor. The latter services include what often is referred to as care or social reproduction. Given that the second group of models views the time that is available to different household members more comprehensively, they also tend to cover leisure. The coverage of the databases (most importantly the SAMs) that accompany the models in each of these two groups reflect whether they are limited to or go beyond the GDP sphere. 

Main Reading

Lofgren, H., Kim, Kijong, Fontana, M. and Cicowiez, M. (2020). A gendered social accounting matrix for South Korea. Paper prepared for the project “The Care Economy and Gender-Sensitive Macroeconomic Modelling for Policy Analysis,” American University, Washington, D.C. (Available at: https://research.american.edu/careworkeconomy/cwe-gam-working-paper-series/) 

Supplementary Reading

Fontana, M. and Wobst, P. (2001). A gendered 1993-94 Social Accounting Matrix for Bangladesh. IFPRI TMD Discussion Paper. 

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