ABSTRACT
Feminist economists have been arguing for the special role of care in the macroeconomy since the late 1980s. They contended that the economic models underlying the prescriptions for social-welfare spending cuts associated with structural adjustment wrongly presumed virtually unlimited supplies of unpaid labor from women and girls, with negative consequences not only for well-being, but for the economic goals of the programs themselves. This chapter highlights three major strands of feminist work that emerged out of the early insights on care and the macroeconomy: efforts to redress the invisibility of unpaid care work in national income accounting; more recent work on social reproduction in macroeconomic modeling; and “care-aware” macroeconomic policy analysis. Adding a household sector, and tracing through the impacts of economic policy shifts on gendered time use gives a better view into the well-being and distribution effects of macroeconomic policy. These are excellent methods for policy interventions, but social reproduction is still external to the system.
