Research Topics

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.

This study proposes a simple modification to a Social Accounting Matrix (SAM) in order to analyze the multiplier effects of a new sector. A different input composition, or technology, of the sector makes a conventional analysis of final-demand injections on existing sectors invalid. Author Kijong Kim shows that the modification—so-called hypothetical integration—is an efficient way to incorporate the difference into the SAM, rather than costly full-scale rebalancing. He applies this method to the case of the Expanded Public Works Programme in South Africa, and demonstrates that the proposed approach effectively represents the labor intensity requirement of the program and a new-factor income distribution.