Intensive Course in Gender-Sensitive Macroeconomic Modeling for Policy Analysis

Day 13: Description of GEM-Care, CGE Model Focused on the Analysis of Care I

Sessions 13.1 – 13.2 Description of GEM-Care, CGE Model Focused on the Analysis of Care I

Instructor: Martín Cicowiez

Topics

GEM-Care is a gendered dynamic CGE model designed for country-level policy analysis with a focus on issues relevant to care. The starting point for the model specification is GEM-Core (Cicowiez and Lofgren 2017), which in its turn draws on Lofgren et al. (2013) and Lofgren et al. (2002). GEM-Core has been extended and adapted to the requirements of care and gender analysis, benefitting from the literature on gendered CGE modeling briefly surveyed above. Like GEM-Core and its predecessors, GEM-Care is a multi-purpose template model since, while it includes specific features important to its focus, it can address a wider range of topics that typically are relevant for CGE analysis, including growth, fiscal space, external shocks, poverty, and inequality. The dynamics of the model is recursive: actors are assumed to be myopic, making decisions on the basis of data for the current year, which are influenced by past decisions. Motivated by our focus on care and gender, the following extensions were brought into GEM-Care: (a) a nested production structure that disaggregates time use by gender and, in addition to GDP production, covers leisure and household services produced for own consumption; (b) a nested structure of household consumption that captures household choices between own production and market supplies to meet its demands for care and other services; (c) interhousehold transfers in the form of unpaid care labor; (d) transfers from government to households in the form of care services; and (c) an extension of the producer first-order conditions for labor hiring that makes it possible to analyze the consequences of wage discrimination (i.e., wage differences that are unrelated to marginal productivity differences). 

Main Reading

Lofgren, H. and Cicowiez, M. (2020). GEM-Care: A gendered dynamic general equilibrium model for analysis of care policies. Paper prepared for the project “The Care Economy and Gender- Sensitive Macroeconomic Modelling for Policy Analysis,” American University, Washington, D.C.A available at: https://research.american.edu/careworkeconomy/cwe-gam-working-paper-series/ 

Supplementary Readings

Fontana, M. and Wood, A. (2000). Modeling the Effects of Trade on Women, at Work and at Home. World Development (28) 7: 117390. Fontana, M. (2013). Gender in Economy-Wide Modelling. In Rai, S.M. y Waylen, G. (eds.). New Frontiers in Feminist Political Economy. Routledge. 

TOP