Research Programs

Countries in crisis round the world face the daunting task of dealing with abrupt increases in unemployment and associated deepening poverty. Greece, in the face of her sovereign debt crisis, has been hit the hardest. Remediating employment policies, including workweek reductions and employment subsidies, abound but have failed to answer the call satisfactorily. Direct public-service job creation, instead, enables communities to mitigate risks and vulnerabilities that rise especially in turbulent times by actively transforming their own economic and social environment.

With underwriting from the Labour Institute of the Greek General Confederation of Workers, the Levy Economics Institute was instrumental in the design and implementation of a social works program of direct job creation throughout Greece. Two-year projects, funded from European Structural Funds, have begun.

This report traces the economic trends preceding and surrounding the economic crisis in Greece, with particular emphasis on recent labor market trends and emerging gaps in social safety net coverage. While its primary focus is identifying the needs in Greece, broader lessons for direct job creation are highlighted, and could be applied to countries entertaining targeted employment creation as a means to alleviate social strains during crisis periods.

The US Business Cycle of 2003–10

The US economic crisis and recession of 2007–09 accelerated the convergence of women’s and men’s employment rates as men experienced disproportionate job losses and women’s entry into the labor force gathered pace. Using the American Time Use Survey (ATUS) data for 2003–10, this study examines whether the narrowing gap in paid work over this period was mirrored in unpaid work, personal care, and leisure time. We find that the gender gap in unpaid work followed a U-pattern, narrowing during the recession but widening afterward. Through segregation analysis, we trace this U-pattern to the slow erosion of gender segregation in housework and, through a standard decomposition analysis of time use by employment status, show that this pattern was mainly driven by movement toward gender-equitable unpaid hours of women and men with the same employment status. In addition, gender inequality in leisure time increased over the business cycle.

The quality of match of three statistical matches used in the LIMTIP estimates for Argentina, Chile, and Mexico is described. The first match combines the 2005 Uso del Tiempo (UT 2005) with the 2006 Encuesto Annual de Hogares (EAH) for Argentina. The second match combines the 2007 Encuesta Experimental sobre Uso del Tiempo en el Gran Santiago (EUT 2007) with the 2006 Encuesta Caracteristización Socioeconómica Nacional (CASEN 2006) for Chile. The third match combines the 2008 Encuesta Nacional de Ingresos y Gastos de los Hogares (ENIGH 2008) with the 2009 Encuesta Nacional sobre Uso del Tiempo (ENUT 2009) for Mexico. In each case, the alignment of the two datasets is examined, after which various aspects of the match quality are described. In each case, the matches are of high quality, given the nature of the source datasets.

The Effects of Child Care and Elder Care on the Standard of Living

Transforming care for children and the elderly from a private to a public domain engenders a series of benefits to the economy that improve our standard of living. We assess the positive impacts of social care from both receivers’ and providers’ points of view. The benefits to care receivers are various, ranging from private, higher returns to education to enhancing subjective well-being and health outcomes. The economy-wide spillovers of the benefits are noteworthy. Early childhood education reduces costs of law enforcement and generates higher long-term economic growth. Home-based health care lowers absenteeism and job losses that otherwise undermine labor productivity, providing adequate care at a lower cost and delaying admission into high-cost institutional care. Social care improves mothers’ labor-market attachment with higher lifetime income; it also lowers physical and psychological burdens of elder care that are becoming more prevalent with an aging population. Social care investment creates more job opportunities than other public spending, especially for workers from poor households and with low levels of educational attainment. The broad contributions of social care to our standard of living should be recognized in the public discourse, particularly in this era of fiscal austerity.

Official poverty thresholds are based on the implicit assumption that the household with poverty-level income possesses sufficient time for household production to enable it to reproduce itself as a unit. Several authors have questioned the validity of the assumption and explored alternative methods to account for time deficits in the measurement of poverty. I critically review the alternative approaches within a unified framework to highlight the commonalities and relative merits of individual approaches. I also propose a two-dimensional, time-income poverty measure that accounts for intrahousehold disparities in the division of household labor and briefly discuss its uses in thinking about antipoverty policies.

This paper provides estimates of the impact of the recent economic crisis on paid and unpaid work time in Turkey. The data used in this study come from the first and only time-use survey available at the national level. Infrequency of collection of time-use data in Turkey does not allow us to make a direct comparison of pre- versus postcrisis time-use patterns. We introduce a tractable way for estimating these possible effects by measuring the impact of an increase in unemployment risk on time-use patterns of women and men living in couple households. The method developed here can be applied to other developing-country cases where there is a lack of longitudinal data availability. Our findings support the argument that economic crises reinforce the preexisting gender inequalities in work time.

By Peter S. Goodman

Huffington Post, September 1, 2011. Copyright © 2011 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc. | “The Huffington Post” is a registered trademark of TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc. All rights reserved.

As President Obama puts the finish on a much-touted program aimed at promoting job creation, public expectations appear low, owing to national dismay over a deep unemployment crisis and the partisan division ruling Washington.

But put aside the limitations of political possibility—granted, a bit like ignoring gravity—and many economists assert there is much the government could do to put large numbers of Americans back to work.

At the top of many to-do lists is government spending into the tens of billions of dollars to finance large-scale public works projects, a strategy that could address a gaping mismatch: Nearly 14 million Americans are officially out of work, yet a great deal of work needs to be done, from repairing dilapidated roads and bridges, to retrofitting government office buildings with energy-efficient infrastructure.

“If the government spends the money directly on government-funded projects, that puts people on payrolls,” said Gary Burtless, a former Labor Department economist and now a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington. He added that the bulk of hiring and spending is likely to be confined to the domestic economy. “You can’t get Brazilian workers to pave a road here in the United States, and lots of capital goods that go into infrastructure would also be produced in the United States,” he said.

Critics of infrastructure spending as a proposed fix for unemployment have argued that it can be inefficient: A surge of money let loose through federal and state bureaucracies invites waste and abuse. To which proponents ask, compared to what?

“The other waste that we should keep front and center in our minds is having nine percent of the workforce unemployed,” Burtless said. “If some of the money is wasted because it is spent too quickly, you’ve got to put that in context of the complete waste of the talents and abilities of the 11 million Americans who would be working if we were at full employment today.”

Infrastructure spending is particularly promising, say proponents, because it is likely to generate jobs in the very areas of the economy that have been hardest hit as the housing boom has gone bust—construction and manufacturing.

“We still have mass layoffs in those sectors,” said Pavlina R. Tcherneva, an economist at Franklin & Marshall College. “It seems very obvious that we can absorb large numbers of workers in those sectors for the public good.”

One proposal that has gained favor among some economists in recent months—among them, Jared Bernstein, previously chief economic adviser to Vice President Biden and now a senior fellow at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities—would direct $50 billion toward repairing aging schools, with a particular focus on making buildings more energy efficient. Proponents say this spending would be financed over a decade by closing $46 billion worth of tax loopholes that now favor the traditional oil and gas industry.

According to an outline of the Fix America’s Schools Today proposal, the nation’s roughly 100,000 public schools confront a backlog of deferred maintenance projects that reaches $270 billion, meaning this money could quickly be absorbed and put to use.

“This is labor-intensive work,” Bernstein told the Huffington Post. “And that’s a good thing. That means more jobs.”

Bernstein helped craft the nearly $800 billion in stimulus spending measures delivered by the Obama administration in early 2009—a package that has since become a symbol of disappointment across the ideological spectrum. Those favoring more aggressive government intervention, led by the economists and Nobel laureates Paul Krugman and Joseph Stiglitz, derided it as too small and poorly targeted to reinvigorate economic growth. Conservatives such as John Taylor, a member of the Council of Economic Advisers in the George H.W. Bush administration, and now a senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, pronounced it a wholesale waste of money that did not create jobs.

But Bernstein and many other economists maintain that the package prevented the unemployment rate from climbing even higher, and he would favor unleashing a new dose of one of its key components: aid for distressed state and local governments, whose budget troubles have prompted deep and sustained layoffs. This is now the dominant force exacerbating joblessness.

“It’s as simple as two plus two,” Bernstein said. “You have states that have to balance their budgets and they are still cutting deeply and they either raise taxes or reduce service, and they have been doing more of the latter, leading to layoffs. State and local fiscal relief would be a great way to get much needed, fast-acting medicine into the system.”

But as Bernstein acknowledges, such proposals are not on the agenda among the decision-makers in Washington, who have instead been consumed with debate over how to reduce the federal budget deficit.

“I don’t see it on anyone’s to do list,” Bernstein said. “It’s very much a should. I’m not sure if it’s a could.”

Among job creation initiatives that experts say could emerge from Washington—albeit, not without considerable congressional wrangling—are the continuation of a temporary reduction on payroll taxes, and the extension of emergency unemployment benefits for people who have been out of work for six months or longer. Both of these temporary programs are set to expire at the end of the year, absent congressional action.

Collectively, they are pumping between $150 billion and $170 billion annually into the economy, Bernstein said.

Beyond the Beltway considerations constraining the scope of policy, some economists advocate more sweeping efforts to generate new jobs by the million.

Tcherneva, the Franklin & Marshall economist, says we need a modern version of the Works Progress Administration, one of the most ambitious undertakings of the New Deal, the federal government’s response to the alarming joblessness of the Great Depression. Then, the government directly employed millions of people, aiming them at building out public works projects of enduring value—dams, highways, parks and firehouses. This time, the federal government could channel funds to state and local government that could then employ private sector firms to build and revamp the needed infrastructure of today, adding light rail to reduce traffic congestion in major cities, upgrading parks and improving access to public education.

“There is such a wide need out there,” Tcherneva said. “The private sector is not creating enough jobs. We need an explicit government commitment to put the jobless to work.”

Some economists argue that infrastructure spending, while a potentially useful way to generate jobs, is not the most potent channel. A paper published last year by the Levy Economics Institute of Bard College concludes that so-called social care—meaning early childhood education and home health care for the elderly—could generate even more jobs per federal dollar spent than infrastructure projects.

“It gives you about twice as many jobs per buck as infrastructure,” said Thomas Masterson, an economist at the Levy Institute and one of the paper’s authors. “And it’s more targeted for women who tend to be disadvantaged.”

The paper calls for $50 billion in annual government spending to hire early childhood educators who would provide child care for young children whose parents cannot afford it. The money would also provide home health care aides for the elderly.

Both of these areas of the economy provide large numbers of jobs to people lacking college degrees—a group now struggling with particularly severe unemployment. Among high school graduates 25 years and older who did not complete college, less than 55 percent are now employed, according to the Department of Labor. That is down from 60 percent four years ago.

Beyond the direct employment benefits, such a program would enable parents now unable to pay for child care to earn income outside their homes, while boosting the skills of children receiving care, Masterson said. Many states are now slashing support for subsidized childcare programs, while also cutting cash assistance programs for poor single mothers.

Other economists assert that the key to job creation is a focus on the people who should be cutting the paychecks, generating fresh incentives for employers to hire.

Two years ago, when the economy was still shedding hundreds of thousands of jobs each month, Aaron Edlin, an economist at the University of California at Berkeley and Edmund Phelps, an economist and Nobel laureate at Columbia University, delivered a paper calling for targeted tax credits for employers who hire low-wage workers.

“The credits would quickly boost the number of low-wage people that businesses employ,” the scholars asserted in their paper. “As the market for low-wage people tightened, the competition for them would pull up low-end pay rates.”

Edlin told HuffPost that this approach is now more urgently needed than ever.

“We have a serious risk of a double-dip recession,” he said. “If one is willing to ignore the political constraints, the best way to get large numbers of people back to work is to give tax credits or subsidies to employers for employing people, and particularly the people who have suffered the most, and that’s low wage people.”

Debate centers on whether such programs would produce sufficient benefits in an economy now painfully short of demand for goods and services, as consumers battered by years of diminishing fortunes pull back on spending.

Masterson, the Levy Institute economist, said that most employers are too worried about weak sales prospects to respond to an incentive to hire.

“If they can’t sell the stuff that they can make now, then why are they going to hire more people?” he said.

But in an economy the size of the United States’, some companies are always expanding. The tax incentives might coax those employers to hire more people than they would have otherwise. And once those workers have extra wages, they would distribute them at other businesses, thus creating more jobs—a virtuous cycle. This is the theory, at least.

“If workers are temporaily on sale,” said Brookings’ Burtless, “that will give employers a reason to add to their payrolls sooner rather than later.”

There is little mystery to explaining our current high levels of unemployment. The Bureau of Economic Analysis recently revised its figures on GDP growth, and revealed that not only was the recession worse than we realized, but recent growth rates have been overstated as well. The hole, in other words, was deeper than we thought, and we have been climbing out of it at a slower pace. Simply put, the economy has failed to recover to the point where it can be expected to generate sufficient job growth. In the event that Congress should turn its attention away from the (so far) purely notional dangers of rising debt levels and back toward the immediate and tangible jobs crisis, it might consider a solution that has been overlooked so far: job creation through social care investment.

Case Studies in South Africa and the United States

This paper demonstrates the strong impacts that public job creation in social care provisioning has on employment creation. Furthermore, it shows that mobilizing underutilized domestic labor resources and targeting them to bridge gaps in community-based services yield strong pro-poor income growth patterns that extend throughout the economy. Social care provision also contributes to promoting gender equality, as women—especially from low-income households—constitute a major workforce in the care sector. We present the ex-ante policy simulation results from two country case studies: South Africa and the United States. Both social accounting matrix–based multiplier analysis and propensity ranking–based microsimulation provide evidence of the pro-poor impacts of the social care expansion.

We need to go beyond the accepted notions relating to the role of women in the economy and society, especially in terms of what is recognized in mainstream theory and policy as “work” done by women. Thus, the traditional gender roles, with the man as the breadwinner and the woman in the role of housekeeper, do not explain the contribution of women in general. We also need to go beyond standard models to interpret the intrahousehold gender inequities. We do not gain much insight from dwelling on the cooperative-conflict type of bargaining concepts either, which are offered in the literature to unfold the process of women’s subordination within households. The issues relate to the intrahousehold power structure, which has an inbuilt bias against female members under patriarchy.

In terms of a policy agenda, especially in the context of social and economic disparities that affect women in particular, we need to recognize not only the collective social norms but also the unequal power relations that influence the sexual division of labor, both within the family and in the workplace. A notion of “gendered moral rationality,” complemented by the Rawlsian concept of “justice as fairness” (implying compensation for the underprivileged), can be used to devise policy that addresses the status of women both in the workplace and at home. We need a concerted move toward sensitization of gender issues and scrutiny entailing a gender audit at every level of activity. This may work at least partially until society is ready to remodel itself by treating men and women equally.

A Strategy for Effective and Equitable Job Creation

Massive job losses in the United States, over eight million since the onset of the “Great Recession,” call for job creation measures through fiscal expansion. In this paper we analyze the job creation potential of social service–delivery sectors—early childhood development and home-based health care—as compared to other proposed alternatives in infrastructure construction and energy. Our microsimulation results suggest that investing in the care sector creates more jobs in total, at double the rate of infrastructure investment. The second finding is that these jobs are more effective in reaching disadvantaged workers—those from poor households and with lower levels of educational attainment. Job creation in these sectors can easily be rolled out. States already have mechanisms and implementation capacity in place. All that is required is policy recalibration to allow funds to be channeled into sectors that deliver jobs both more efficiently and more equitably.

This study is concerned with the measurement of poverty in the context of developing countries. We argue that poverty rankings must take into account time use dimensions of paid and unpaid work jointly. Reviewing the current state of the literature on this topic, our methodology introduces a critical but missing analytical distinction between time poverty and time deprivation. On this basis, we proceed to provide empirical evidence by using South African time use survey data compiled in 2000. Our findings show that existing methods that work well for advanced countries require modification when adopted in the case of a developing country. The results identify a group of adults who previously were inadvertently missing, as they were considered "time wealthy."

Gender Perspectives and Policy Choices

This paper looks at the countries of Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) and the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), where economies have been most dramatically hit by the global crisis and its impact is likely to be most long-lasting, especially among poor and vulnerable groups. Using poverty as the main axis, it looks at aspects of economic and social development in countries at similar poverty levels to identify the degree of fiscal space in each, as well as the different policy choices made. The paper argues that despite such economic fundamentals as increasing external debt, worsening current account imbalances, and demands for a balanced budget, governments have policy choices to make about how to protect different groups, especially the most vulnerable—including women.

In his State of the Union address President Obama acknowledged that “our most urgent task is job creation”—that a move toward full employment will lay the foundation for long-term economic growth and ensure that the federal government creates the necessary conditions for businesses to expand and hire more workers. According to a new study by Levy scholars Rania Antonopoulos, Kijong Kim, Thomas Masterson, and Ajit Zacharias, the government needs to identify and invest in projects that have the potential for massive, and immediate, public job creation. They conclude that social sector investment, such as early childhood education and home-based care, would generate twice as many jobs as infrastructure spending and nearly 1.5 times the number created by investment in green energy, while catering to the most vulnerable segments of the workforce.

Despite the policy realm’s growing recognition of fiscal devolution in gender development, there have been relatively few attempts to translate gender commitments into fiscal commitments. This paper aims to engage in this significant debate, focusing on the plausibility of incorporating gender into financial devolution, with the Thirteenth Finance Commission of India as backdrop. Given the disturbing demographics—the monotonous decline in the juvenile sex ratio, especially in some of the prosperous states of India—there can be no valid objection to using Finance Commission transfers for this purpose. A simple method for accomplishing this could be to introduce some weight in favor of the female population of the states in the Commission’s fiscal devolution formula. The message would be even stronger and more appropriate if the population of girl children only—that is, the number of girls in the 0–6 age cohort—is adopted as the basis for determining the states’ relative shares of the amount to be disbursed by applying the allotted weight. A special dispensation for girls would also be justifiable in a scheme of need-based equalization transfers. While social mores cannot be changed by fiscal fiats, particularly when prejudices run deep, a proactive approach by a high constitutional body like the Finance Commission is called for, especially when the prejudices are blatantly oppressive. Indeed, such action is imperative. The intergovernmental transfer system can and should play a role in upholding the right to life for India’s girl children. That being said, it needs to be mentioned that it is not plausible to incorporate more gender variables in the Finance Commission’s already complex transfer formula. In other words, inclusion of a “gender inequality index” in the formula may not result in the intended results, as the variables included in the index may cancel one another out. Accepting the fact that incorporating gender criteria in fiscal devolution could only be the second-best principle for engendering fiscal policy, the paper argues that newfound policy space for the feminization of local governance, coupled with an engendered fiscal devolution to the third tier, can lead to public expenditure decisions that correspond more closely to the revealed preferences (“voice”) of women. With the 73rd and 74th constitutional amendments, this policy space is favorable at the local level for conducting gender responsive budgeting.

In his State of the Union address President Obama acknowledged that “our most urgent task is job creation”—that a move toward full employment will lay the foundation for long-term economic growth and ensure that the federal government creates the necessary conditions for businesses to expand and hire more workers. According to a new study by Levy scholars Rania Antonopoulos, Kijong Kim, Thomas Masterson, and Ajit Zacharias, the government needs to identify and invest in projects that have the potential for massive, and immediate, public job creation. They conclude that social sector investment, such as early childhood education and home-based care, would generate twice as many jobs as infrastructure spending and nearly 1.5 times the number created by investment in green energy, while catering to the most vulnerable segments of the workforce.

Gender, Time Use and Poverty in Developing Countries

This volume offers both theoretical and policy-oriented examinations of the value of unpaid work, usually unacknowledged but increasingly recognized as an organic component of the economy. Particularly in developing countries, much of the provisioning of basic needs occurs beyond the boundaries of market transactions. This book reveals a need to incorporate unpaid work in economic analysis—specifically, in the context of poverty and gender equality.

The research focuses on three significant regions: Africa, Latin America, and Asia. Contributors investigate the intersections of income poverty, unpaid work, and women's overtaxed time, building upon the existing literature and synthesizing diverse strands of time-use survey data to make concrete policy recommendations for development strategies. Individual chapters assess established measures of time use, propose new ones, and analyze and compare possible alternates. Conceptual and empirical studies identifying key issues related to the measurement and evaluation of time distribution are also included, as are estimates and their significance.

This collection resulted from a project undertaken by the Levy Economics Institute of Bard College in collaboration with members of the International Working Group on Gender, Macroeconomics, and International Economics (GEM-IWG) to analyze the many economic implications of nonmarket activities disproportionately carried out by women worldwide—willingly or not.

Published By: Palgrave Macmillan

This paper evaluates gender wage differentials in Georgia between 2000 and 2004. Using ordinary least squares, we find that the gender wage gap in Georgia is substantially higher than in other transition countries. Correcting for sample selection bias using the Heckman approach further increases the gender wage gap. The Blinder Oaxaca decomposition results suggest that most of the wage gap remains unexplained. The explained portion of the gap is almost entirely attributed to industrial variables. We find that the gender wage gap in Georgia diminished between 2000 and 2004.

This study uses the first time-use survey carried out in South Africa (2000) to examine women’s and men’s time use, with a focus on the impacts of income poverty. We empirically explore the determinants of time spent on different paid and unpaid work activities, including a variety of household and individual characteristics, using bivariate and multivariate Tobit estimations. Our results show asymmetric impacts of income poverty on women’s and men’s time use. Time-use patterns of South African women and men reveal the unequal burden of income poverty among household members. While being poor increases the amount of time women spend on unpaid work, we do not see any significant impact on men’s unpaid work time. For example, women in poor households spend more time than men collecting water and fuel, as well as maintaining their homes.

Lessons Learned from South Africa’s Expanded Public Works Programme

Beyond loss of income, joblessness is associated with greater poverty, marginalization, and social exclusion; the current global crisis is clearly not helping. In this new Public Policy Brief, Research Scholar Rania Antonopoulos explores the impact of both joblessness and employment expansion on poverty, paying particular attention to the gender aspects of poverty and poverty-reducing public employment schemes targeting poor women.

The author presents the results of a Levy Institute study that examines the macroeconomic consequences of scaling up South Africa’s Expanded Public Works Programme by adding to it a new sector for social service delivery in health and education. She notes that gaps in such services for households that cannot afford to pay for them are mostly filled by long hours of invisible, unpaid work performed by women and children. Her proposed employment creation program addresses several policy objectives: income and job generation, provisioning of communities’ unmet needs, skill enhancement for a new cadre of workers, and promotion of gender equality by addressing the overtaxed time of women.

 

The Macroeconomic Implications of HIV and AIDS on Women's Time-tax Burdens

This paper considers public employment guarantee programs in the context of South Africa as a means to address the nexus of poverty, unemployment, and unpaid work burdens—all factors exacerbated by HIV/AIDS. It further discusses the need for genderinformed public job creation in areas that mitigate the “time-tax” burdens of women, and examines a South African initiative to address social sector service delivery deficits within the government’s Expanded Public Works Programme. The authors highlight the need for well-designed employment guarantee programs—specifically, programs centered on community and home-based care—as a potential way to help offset the destabilizing effects of HIV/AIDS and endemic poverty. The paper concludes with results from macroeconomic simulations of such a program, using a social accounting matrix framework, and sets out implications for both participants and policymakers.

Lessons Learned from South Africa’s Expanded Public Works Programme

Beyond loss of income, joblessness is associated with greater poverty, marginalization, and social exclusion; the current global crisis is clearly not helping. In this new Public Policy Brief, Research Scholar Rania Antonopoulos explores the impact of both joblessness and employment expansion on poverty, paying particular attention to the gender aspects of poverty and poverty-reducing public employment schemes targeting poor women.

The author presents the results of a Levy Institute study that examines the macroeconomic consequences of scaling up South Africa’s Expanded Public Works Programme by adding to it a new sector for social service delivery in health and education. She notes that gaps in such services for households that cannot afford to pay for them are mostly filled by long hours of invisible, unpaid work performed by women and children. Her proposed employment creation program addresses several policy objectives: income and job generation, provisioning of communities’ unmet needs, skill enhancement for a new cadre of workers, and promotion of gender equality by addressing the overtaxed time of women.

 

A Gender Perspective

Widespread economic recessions and protracted financial crises have been documented as setting back gender equality and other development goals in the past. In the midst of the current global crisis—often referred to as “the Great Recession”—there is grave concern that progress made in poverty reduction and women’s equality will be reversed. Indeed, for many developing countries it is particularly worrisome that, through no fault of their own, the global economic downturn has exacerbated effects from other crises manifest in food insecurity, poverty, and increasing inequality. This paper explores both well-known and less discussed paths of transmission through which crises affect women’s world of work and overall wellbeing. As demand for textile and agricultural exports decline, along with tourism, job losses are expected to rise in these female-intensive industries. In addition, the gendered nature of the world of work suggests that women will see an increase in their share among informal and vulnerable workers worldwide, and will also supply more of their labor under unpaid conditions. The latter is particularly important in the context of developing countries, where many production activities take place outside the strict boundaries of the market. The paper also makes this point: examined through the prism of gender equality, the ability of the state to implement countercyclical policies matters greatly. If policy responses at the national and international levels end up aggravating inequities, gender equality processes face many more barriers, especially among the poor.

Gender affects household spending in two areas that have been widely studied in the literature. One strand documents that greater female bargaining power within households results in a variety of shifts in household production and consumption. An important source of intrahousehold bargaining power is ownership of assets, especially land. Another strand examines gender bias in spending on children. This paper addresses both strands simultaneously. In it, differences in spending on education are examined empirically, at both the household and the individual level. Results are mixed, though the balance of evidence weighs toward pro-male bias in spending on education at the household level. Results also indicate that the relationship between asset ownership and female bargaining power within the household is contingent on the type of asset.

In order to provide a coherent perspective of gender differences in the world of work, the many intersections of paid and unpaid work must be brought to light. It is well documented that gender-based wage differentials and occupational segregation continue to characterize the division of labor among men and women in paid work; yet unpaid work in social reproduction, subsistence production, family businesses, and the community is often ignored. When it is taken into account, it is usually done in a very limited manner, equating unpaid work with the traditional roles women play in raising children and performing maintenance chores. Beyond the obvious gender inequalities characterizing the latter, unpaid work constitutes an integral part of any functioning economy, and as such is linked to economic growth, government policy, migration, and many development issues. This paper concludes that the “world of work” cannot be treated in complete disregard to unpaid forms of labor, and gender equality must be understood through the lens of the paid–unpaid work continuum.

Women Carpet Weavers of Iran

The process of economic globalization has winners and losers. Iran’s carpet industry provides a good illustration of the adverse side of this process. As the production costs of its rivals have fallen, surging international trade has reduced the market share of Iran's labor-intensive products, especially Persian carpets.

This paper reports the findings of an informal survey of carpet weavers conducted in and around the Iranian city of Kashan, showing how harsh international competition has reduced the weavers’ real wages and restructured the labor force of the industry in Iran. Middle-income families have left the industry, and poor Afghan immigrant householders and their children are increasingly taking the place of Iranian weavers. Furthermore, weaving is consistent with the subordinate position of women carpet weavers within the household; as a form of employment, it has hardly affected the social status quo.

Evidence from a Time-use Survey for the Water Sector in India

This paper presents new evidence on the links between public-infrastructure provisioning and time allocation related to the water sector in India. An analysis of time-use data reveals that worsening public infrastructure affects market work, with evident gender differentials. The results also suggest that access to public infrastructure can lead to substitution effects in time allocation between unpaid work and market work. The broad conclusion of the paper is that public-investment policy can redress intrahousehold inequalities, in terms of labor-supply decisions, by supporting initiatives that reduce the allocation of time in nonmarket work.

South Africa and India

Documents relating to the South Africa and India case studies are available below.

SOUTH AFRICA	INDIA
Policy Brief Full Report Appendix A. SAM–SA Technical Report Appendix B. Statistical Analysis Appendix C. Job Identification Tables Appendix D. SAM Reformulation	Policy Brief Full Report Appendix A. SAM-Nana Kotda Village Appendix B. A Note on the Village Sam Appendix C. A Summary Table on Unpaid Work and Its Implications for Public Works Programmes
Annotated Bibliography

The Impact of Argentina’s Jefes Program on Female Heads of Poor Households

In 2002, Argentina implemented a large-scale public employment program to deal with the latest economic crisis and the ensuing massive unemployment and poverty. The program, known as Plan Jefes, offered part-time work for unemployed heads of households, and yet more than 70 percent of the people who turned up for work were women. The present paper evaluates the operation of this program, its macroeconomic effects, and its impact on program participants. We report findings from our 2005 meetings with policymakers and visits to different project sites. We find that Jefes addresses many important community problems, is well received by participants, and serves the needs of women particularly well. Some of the benefits women report are working in mother-friendly jobs, getting needed training and education, helping the community, and finding dignity and empowerment through work.

Evidence from an Asymmetric VAR Model

This paper analyzes the real (direct) and financial crowding out in India between 1970–71 and 2002–03. Using an asymmetric vector autoregressive (VAR) model, the paper finds no real crowding out between public and private investment; rather, complementarity is observed between the two. The dynamics of financial crowding out is captured through the dual transmission mechanism via the real rate of interest—that is, whether private capital formation is interest-rate sensitive and, in turn, whether the rise in the real rate of interest is induced by a fiscal deficit. The study found empirical evidence for the former but not the latter, supporting the conclusion that there is no financial crowding out in India. The differential impacts of public infrastructure and noninfrastruture innovations on the private corporate sector are carried out separately to analyze the nonhomogeneity aspects of public investment. The results of the Impulse Response Function reinforced that no other macrovariables, including cost and quantity of credit and the output gap, have been as significant as public investment—in particular, public infrastructure investment—in determining private corporate investment in the medium and long terms, which has crucial policy implications.

Employment Guarantee Policies from a Gender Perspective

There is now widespread recognition that in most countries, private-sector investment has not been able to absorb surplus labor. This is all the more the case for poor unskilled people. Public works programs and employment guarantee schemes in South Africa, India, and other countries provide jobs while creating public assets. In addition to physical infrastructure, an area that has immense potential to create much-needed jobs is that of social service delivery and social infrastructure. While unemployment and enforced “idleness” persist, existing time-use survey data reveal that people around the world—especially women and children—spend long hours performing unpaid work. This work includes not only household maintenance and care provisioning for family members and communities, but also time spent that helps fill public infrastructural gaps—for example, in the energy, health, and education sectors. This paper suggests that, by bringing together public job creation, on the one hand, and unpaid work, on the other, well-designed employment guarantee policies can promote job creation, gender equality, and pro-poor development.

Previous work has shown a pattern of lower household incomes for those Paraguayan farms with female landowners in the household. The study of agricultural production reveals that Paraguayan women specialize in livestock and dairy production, while men specialize in crop production. An analysis of crop specialization and crop yields finds no significant differences in yields among households along gender lines, although women appear to specialize in food crops. Finally, households with female land rights have markedly lower rates of return on agricultural production.

We explore the relationships between aggregate profitability and women’s growing share of market work in the United States during the 1980s and 1990s. Using decomposition analysis and counterfactuals, we investigate whether the contribution of the declining wage share to the upswing in profitability was aided by the growing incorporation of women into the workforce. Results show that women helped to moderate the decline in the aggregate wage share. The counterfactuals suggest that the reduction in gender pay disparity overwhelmed the negative effect of women’s growing share of market work on the wage share. The decline in the wage share was driven primarily by distributional changes within the sectors rather than by changes in the composition of value added. In sectors where wage shares fell, however, women did not restrain the fall, indicating that the aggregate outcome was the net result of distinct sectoral trends in women’s employment.

Evidence from Bolivia

This working paper analyzes paid and unpaid work-time inequalities among Bolivian urban adults using time use data from a 2001 household survey. We identified a gender-based division of labor characterized not so much by who does what type of work but by how much work of each type they do. There is a trade-off between paid and unpaid work, but this trade-off is only partial: women’s entry into the labor market tends to result in a double shift of paid and unpaid work. We also find very high levels of within-group inequality in the distributions of paid and unpaid work-time for men and women, a sign that, beyond the sexual division of labor, subgroup differentiation is also important. Using decompositions of the inequality in the distribution of total time spent at work, we show that gender plays an important role in determining the proportion of paid to unpaid work done by individuals, but it plays a lesser role in determining the higher total workload of some individuals relative to others.

Toward a Path of Expanded Democracy and Gender Equality

Should the state treat men and women in identical ways, or should it legislate and enforce policies that are aware of gender differences? In other words, should the state be gender-blind or gender-sensitive? Gender, ethnic, religious, sexual orientation, ideological, economic, political, and cultural dimensions represent diversity among citizens. This paper argues that if the goal of the state is to promote democratic participation for all, a distinction must be drawn between socioeconomic characteristics that signify difference and those that manifest inequalities. The former require a politics of acceptance and recognition and policies to match, while the latter necessitate interventions that remedy or remove structural elements that result in inequalities. The authors suggest that such a framework is useful in that it lends itself to a better understanding of gender-based asymmetries.

Although the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) have been ratified in global and national forums, they have not yet been incorporated into operational planning within governments or international organizations. The weak link between the policies and the investments needed for their implementation is one barrier to progress. An assessment of the resources required is a critical first step in formulating and implementing strategies to achieve the MDGs.

This is especially true for policies to promote gender equality and empower women. Although enough is known about such policies to implement them successfully, the costs of such interventions are not systematically calculated and integrated into country-level budgeting processes. Using country-level data, the paper estimates the costs of interventions aimed at promoting gender equality and women's empowerment in Bangladesh, Cambodia, Ghana, Tanzania, and Uganda. It then uses these estimates to calculate the costs of such interventions in other low-income countries. Finally, the paper projects the financing gap for interventions that aim directly at achieving gender equality, first for the five countries, and subsequently for all low-income countries

Competition and Gender Wage and Employment Differentials in US Manufacturing

This study investigates the impact of increased import competition on gender wage and employment differentials in American manufacturing over the period from 1976 to 1993. Increased import competition is expected to decrease the relative demand for workers in low-wage production occupations and the relative demand for women workers, given the high female share in these occupations. The findings support this hypothesis. Disproportionate job losses for women in low-wage production occupations was associated with rising imports in US manufacturing over this period, and as low-wage women lost their jobs, the average wage of the remaining women in the study increased, thereby narrowing the gender wage gap.

Evidence from Thailand

Gender differences have long been documented in earnings, employment opportunities, and time spent within the unpaid care economy. This paper joins the recent efforts in the economics literature on gender differences in asset ownership. Specifically, it investigates whether a gender-specific composition in asset ownership between heads of households and spouses can be detected among low-income, urban households in Bangkok, Thailand. The present case study explores this issue empirically, using a sample of 134 couples from a 2002 survey that collected data at the level of the individual respondent on accumulated physical and financial assets. Both husband and wife were interviewed separately and the data gathered from the interviews include pertinent household and individual information on employment, credit and household decision-making issues. The findings suggest that asset composition varies by gender, indicating that further investigation is warranted on this topic. Tobit and Probit tests are used to examine the factors that may affect this gendered pattern.

Evidence from East Asia

This study explores the impact of competition from international trade on the gender wage gap in Taiwan and South Korea between 1980 and 1999. The dynamic implications of Becker's 1959 theory of discrimination lead one to expect that increased competition from international trade reduces the incentive for employers to discriminate against women. This effect should be more pronounced in concentrated sectors of the economy, where employers can use excess profits to cover the costs of discrimination. Alternatively, wage discrimination may increase with growing trade limiting women's ability to achieve wage gains. The empirical strategy controls for differences in market structure across industries in order to isolate the effect of competition from international trade. Estimation results are not consistent with Becker's theory, as greater international competition in concentrated sectors is associated with larger wage gaps between men and women.

We use data from the Current Population Survey (CPS 1994-2001) to document the relationship between gender-specific demographic variations and the gender-poverty gap among eight racial/ethnic groups. We find that black and Puerto Rican women experience a double disadvantage owing to being both women and members of a minority group. As compared with whites, however, gender inequality among other minority groups is relatively small. By utilizing a standardization technique, we are able to estimate the importance of gender-specific demographic and socioeconomic composition in shaping differences in men's and women's poverty rates both within and across racial/ethnic lines. The analysis reveals that sociodemographic characteristics have a distinct effect on the poverty rate of minority women, and that the form and the magnitude of the effect vary across racial/ethnic lines. By incorporating the newly available immigration information in the CPS data, we are also able to document the effect of immigration status on gender inequality. The social and economic implications of the findings for the study of gender inequality are discussed in the last section of the article.