Feminist Economics And Public Policy

Professor Ailsa McKay, who was known not only for her work as a feminist economist but also her influence on Scottish social and economic policy, died in 2014 at the height of her academic career and impact on public life. Organised around the key themes of Ailsa McKay’s work, this collection brings together eminent contributors to argue for the importance of making women's roles and needs more visible in economic and social policies. Feminist Economics and Public Policy presents a uniquely coherent analysis of key issues including gender mainstreaming, universal childcare provision and universal basic income security, in the context of today’s challenging economic and political environments. It draws on international perspectives to look at the economic role of women, presenting readers with interrelated sections on gender budgeting and work and childcare, before concluding with a discussion on Citizens Basic Income and how it could contribute towards a more efficient, equitable social security system. The theoretical, empirical and practice based contributions assembled here present recommendations for more effective public policy, working towards a world in which women’s diverse roles are recognized and fully accounted for. This book is a unique collection, which will be of great relevance to those studying gender and economics, as well as to researchers or policy makers.

Professor Ailsa McKay, who was known not only for her work as a feminist economist but also her influence on Scottish social and economic policy, died in 2014 at the height of her academic career and impact on public life. Organised around the key themes of Ailsa McKay's work, this collection brings together eminent contributors to argue for the importance of making women's roles and needs more visible in economic and social policies. Feminist Economics and Public Policy presents a uniquely coherent analysis of key issues including gender mainstreaming, universal childcare provision and universal basic income security, in the context of today's challenging economic and political environments. It draws on international perspectives to look at the economic role of women, presenting readers with interrelated sections on gender budgeting and work and childcare, before concluding with a discussion on Citizens Basic Income and how it could contribute towards a more efficient, equitable social security system. The theoretical, empirical and practice based contributions assembled here present recommendations for more effective public policy, working towards a world in which women's diverse roles are recognized and fully accounted for. This book is a unique collection, which will be of great relevance to those studying gender and economics, as well as to researchers or policy makers.

This volume brings together the work of outstanding feminist scholars who reflect on the achievements of feminist political economy and the challenges it faces in the 21st century. The volume develops further some key areas of research in feminist political economy – understanding economies as gendered structures and economic crises as crises in social reproduction, as well as in finance and production; assessing economic policies through the lens of women’s rights; analysing global transformations in women’s work; making visible the unpaid economy in which care is provided for family and communities, and critiquing the ways in which policy makers are addressing ( or failing to address) this unpaid economy.

Many questions arise of an economic nature that are only partially addressed by standard economic analysis. These lacunae give rise to particular lines of critique in economics, including a wide-ranging and increasingly cogent feminist approach to reenvisioning economics. This book provides a comprehensive description of this intriguing new area of feminist economics. It includes discussion of what constitutes feminist economics and how feminist economics is different from other approaches. The intellectual origins of the area are explicated, and the current state of the subfield outlined. Specific topics covered include conflict over terminology, pedagogy, and content in the field of economics, measurement of the unmeasured economy, the role of caring labor in the economy, heteronormativity in economics, feminist approaches to economic development, multiple approaches to empiricism, modeling of intrahousehold relationships, consideration of the role of property rights in reifying gender roles, differential effects of international trade and finance by gender, and feminist approaches to public finance and social welfare.

Papers presented at a Gender, Race, Economics, and Public Policy conference coordinated by the New School for Social Research.

Harvesting Feminist Knowledge for Public Policy brings together 14 essays by feminist thinkers from different parts of the world, reflecting on the flaws in the current patterns of development and arguing for political, economic, and social changes to promote equality and sustainability. The contributors argue that the very approach being taken to understand and measure progress, and plan for and evaluate development, needs rethinking in ways that draw on the experiences and knowledge of women. All the essays, in diverse ways, offer proposals for alternative ideas to address the limitations and contradictions of currently dominant theories and practices in development, and move towards the creation of a socially just and egalitarian world.

Economic and financial crises have become perennial features of today’s global economy. Macroeconomic theories of crisis, including the global crisis that unfolded in 2008, emphasize the role of financial deregulation; capital flow imbalances; and growing debt, fueled by income and wealth inequality. These approaches tend to be divorced from feminist thinking which analyzes broader distributional dynamics transmitted through structural channels and government policy responses, with an emphasis on gender, race, class and ethnicity. This volume brings together innovative thinking from heterodox macroeconomists and feminist economists to explore the causes, consequences, and ramifications of economic crises. By doing so, it highlights aspects of the economy that are frequently overlooked or ignored, such as the impact of crises on the vast amount of unpaid work which women perform relative to men.? The collection of international studies assembled here takes an innovative approach to analyzing a range of issues, from the subprime mortgage crisis to the gendered effects of austerity to the role of the International Monetary Fund in governing an unstable global economy. In so doing, it looks beyond causes and consequences and points to new directions for macroeconomic and financial policy. This book was originally published as a special issue of Feminist Economics.

Questioning Financial Governance from a Feminist Perspective brings together feminist economists and feminist political economists from different countries located in North America and Europe to analyze the ‘strategic silence’ about gender in fiscal and monetary policy, and financial regulation. This silence reflects a set of assumptions that the key instruments of financial governance are gender-neutral. This often masks the ways in which financial governance operates to the disadvantage of women and reinforces gender inequality. This book examines both the transformations in the governance of finance that predate the financial crisis, as well as some dimension of the crisis itself. The transformations increasingly involved private as well as public forms of power, along with institutions of state and civil society, operating at the local, national, regional and global levels. An important aspect of these transformations has been the creation of policy rules (often enacted in laws) that limit the discretion of national policy makers with respect to fiscal, monetary, and financial sector policies. These policy rules tend to have inscribed in them a series of biases that have gender (as well as class and race-based) outcomes. The biases identified by the authors in the various chapters are the deflationary bias, male breadwinner bias, and commodification bias, adding two new biases: risk bias and creditor bias. The originality of the book is that its primary focus is on macroeconomic policies (fiscal and monetary) and financial governance from a feminist perspective with a focus on the gross domestic product and its fluctuations and growth, paid employment and inflation, the budget surplus/deficit, levels of government expenditure and tax revenue, and supply of money. The central findings are that the key instruments of financial governance are not gender neutral. Each chapter considers examples of financial governance, and how it relates to the gender order, including divisions of labour, and relations of power and privilege. This book is key reading for anyone studying feminist economics, and should also be of interest to those researching macroeconomics, political economics and women’s studies.