Macroeconomic Policies and Care: Exploring Intersections

Tuesday, March 4, 5pm
Blithewood Conference Room or on Zoom

Join us for our third session of the 2025 Spring Semester, with Raquel Coello Cremades, UN Women Policy Advisor on Macroeconomics and Global Care Economy Officer, on Tuesday, March 4th, from 5pm to 6pm in the Levy Conference Room at Blithewood, or on Zoom. Dr. Coello-Cremades’ presentation will be followed by an open Q&A session with audience members—both those in person and on Zoom are welcome to ask questions.

Care work requires a new conceptualization of the economic system to appropriately integrate its scope and quality. Qualitatively, given its fundamental functions, care work remains central to the social reproduction of the population. It interacts with public services and the production of market goods and services essential for the population’s subsistence (Picchio, 2001). This inadequate conceptualization extends to the design of macroeconomic policies, which fail to account for or reflect the contributions of care work to the macroeconomy. These contributions include the reproduction and maintenance of the workforce, the expansion of monetary income, the enhancement of living standards, and the strengthening of fiscal policy through the promotion of inclusive growth, the reduction of inequality, and the improvement of spending and investment efficiency in other social protection pillars. This relationship with fiscal policy is reciprocal, as the strengthening and expansion of fiscal space are crucial for adequately financing policies and systems.

Raquel Coello Cremades, UN Women Policy Advisor on Macroeconomics and Global Care Economy Officer, has a PhD in International Economy and Development and a Master’s Degree in Gender and Development. Between August 2017 and April 2024 she worked as Regional Policy Specialist on Economic Empowerment at the UN Women Regional office for the Americas and the Caribbean. Previously she worked for the organization as regional coordinator of the UN Women/Unifem ‘s Latin-American Gender Responsive Budgeting Programme and programme specialist on economic and social rights. She has over 23 years of experience working as an advisor, researcher and trainer in the area of women’s economic empowerment and gender responsive economic policies and budgets in more than 20 countries of Latin America, Africa, Arab States, and Europe. In the academic filed, she coordinated the Specialized Course in Fiscal Policy and Gender Responsive Budgeting of the PRIGEPP for FLACSO-Argentina and teaches regularly in several Postgraduate courses. She is also part of the International Working Group of Gender, Macroeconomics and Internacional Economy (GEM-IWG).