ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews the definition, framing and claiming of care policies in the Global South, and their institutionalization in the case of Latin America, building on both feminist economics and feminist social policy contributions. From a social justice perspective, care policies are “transformative” when they are able to simultaneously guarantee the rights, agency, autonomy and well-being of both care receivers and caregivers, be them unpaid or paid. Transformative care policies bring care workers to the fore, as providing good quality care and decent work for care workers are two sides of the same coin. Care systems are established by law, are universal in ambition, aim to overcome fragmentation and entail the institutionalization of inter-sectoral coordination mechanisms. While the orthodox macroeconomic case for the expansion of care policies assumes that women’s greater labor force participation automatically translates to growth—without factoring in the necessary expansion of aggregate demand for that to happen—the heterodox case focuses precisely on positive demand-side labor market impacts.
