This session gives a critical overview of macroeconomic approaches to gender and care. We will start with the Seguino (2020) reading, an excellent overview of feminist approaches to macro, which is important to establish. Then turning to care more specifically, we will start where most students with a background in economics do, with the notion of human capital, covering both neoclassical/conventional approaches, political economy, and feminist approaches, drawing from Folbre’s paper in the RRPE. It is with the latter that we bridge into talking about care, social reproduction and macroeconomics. Then, we will discuss Braunstein (2021) that provides an overview of approaches to care and the macroeconomy, including national income accounting, transforming macroeconomic modeling, and sectoral disaggregation for care-aware policy analysis.
Elissa Braunstein. 2021. “Care and the Macroeconomy,” in Günseli Berik and Ebru Kongar (eds.) The Routledge Handbook of Feminist Economics. Routledge, forthcoming in 2021.
Seguino, Stephanie. 2020. “Engendering Macroeconomic Theory and Policy.” Feminist Economics 26(2): 27-61.
Nancy Folbre. 2012. “The Political Economy of Human Capital.” Review of Radical Political Economics 44(3): 281-292.