Background
The dynamics of care are receiving increasing attention
from activists, researchers, and policy actors. While this may be in part a
reflection of women’s greater political visibility and agency, and the fact that
once in office they have sometimes championed issues such as family and care
policy, there are also economic and social pressures underpinning academic and
policy interest in this area.
Women’s entry into the paid work force—a
near-global trend—has squeezed the time hitherto allocated to the care of family
and friends on an unpaid basis. While the decline in fertility across many
regions means that there are fewer children to be cared for, demographic aging
in some countries and major health crises in others, have intensified the need
for caring services. In many developing countries where public health services
have been severely weakened during the decades of reform, much of the care
burden has inevitably fallen back on women and girls. Paid care services have
become a growing sector of the economy in many contexts, especially in the more
developed economies, as a result of women’s increasing participation in the paid
labour force. These services in turn employ many women. In this context, the
quality of care, and the pay and working conditions of carers, have become
contested policy issues. Paid care services have been susceptible to competitive
pressures that generate low pay/low quality outcomes—adversely affecting both
care workers and the recipients of care.
Recent years have seen a growing
literature, from diverse disciplinary perspectives converging around the issue
of care. These intellectual currents include efforts within feminist economics
to construct analytical frameworks for understanding the “other economy” where
the direct production and maintenance of human beings takes place, as well as
methodologies for measuring and valuing it. From within social policy research
there have been concerted efforts to engender welfare regimes analysis by
bringing in issues of care. Dovetailing, and enriching, these diverse conceptual
and empirical engagements, has been a philosophical conversation about the
“ethics of care”, contesting the narrowness of an ethic of paid work that drives
policy agendas and reforms across welfare states.
The key features of
the UNRISD project
This project is undertaking comparative research on
the multiple institutions of care (households and families; states; markets; and
the not-for-profit sector), their gender composition and dynamics, and their
implications for poverty and social rights of citizenship. It seeks to undertake
empirical research on the care sector in different developing regions and to
connect the analysis to some of the conceptual debates on care that has taken
the developed capitalist economies as its point of reference. The research spans
across eight countries drawn from four different regions: Argentina and
Nicaragua; South Africa and Tanzania; South Korea and India; Switzerland and
Spain. From each region one country with a more developed welfare infrastructure
and another with a less developed welfare architecture have been identified; all
countries have at least one recent time use survey (TUS) available.
The
institutions involved in the provision of care may be conceptualised in a
stylised fashion as a “care diamond”, to include the family/household, markets,
the public sector, and the not-for-profit sector (although typologies are always
problematic). The research seeks to understand the gender inequalities and power
dynamics that are embedded within these different institutions, and to capture
the implications of different care arrangements for those who provide care, on a
paid or unpaid basis, in terms of poverty and access to social rights
(differentiated by class, gender, race or caste). While the institutions
captured by the “diamond” need to be systematically explored across all country
studies, the type of care being studied (care of children, the elderly, the
chronically ill) will vary across countries.
The project combines a
variety of qualitative and quantitative methods of examining how care is
provided in different countries. Some of these methods will be country-specific,
but there will also be attempts to utilise some methods and approaches across
all countries so as to facilitate comparison. While the availability of time use
data is critical for the research (in most countries there is only one survey to
draw on), the intention is not to limit the research questions to the data that
are easily available through the TUS. Other data sources will also be used to
trace changes in the economic/labour force and social structure leading up to
the period for which a TUS is available, as well as add detail to the snapshot
picture provided by the TUS. Each country is taking an analytically strong time
frame that allows for comparisons within that country and draws on diverse
sources of information (both quantitative and qualitative) to make sense of
social processes and trajectories.
Cross-cutting research questions
and methodologies
1. Historical context and processes of social change
(desk-top research)
Political and economic trajectories and their impacts on
labour market institutions, welfare and care institutions, and poverty and
inequality will be delineated. Socio-demographic changes, including changes in
household structure and size across social groups; changes in fertility, age
structure, and marriage practices will also be documented. Economic and labour
force changes from a gender perspective will be elaborated: size, age, and
gender composition of the paid work force as well as different contractual
forms.
2. Unpaid care provision (within households) and its
intersections with the paid economy (analysis of primary data from TUS)
The
household constitutes a key institution where unpaid care is provided. The
research seeks to explore how the provision of unpaid care is combined with paid
work for different household members. In some countries it may be difficult to
combine TUS data with labour market/household income data. Moreover, in most
countries there is only one TUS available, making it impossible to provide an
analysis of change in these aspects over time. The aim is to obtain a
disaggregated analysis of these dimensions across income or expenditure
categories; household types, and other social stratifications depending on
context (e.g. race, caste).
3. A comprehensive overview of institutional
frameworks and policies related to care services in non-household institutions
will be undertaken (based on primary evidence and selected interviews with key
informants). This would include the analysis of non-household institutions
involved in the provision of care for specific groups of people needing care
(young children, elderly, chronically ill): the form, role and significance of
public sector institutions; the extent and character of different types of
market provision; as well as the character and significance of care provided by
the not-for-profit sector (e.g. community provision, charities, NGOs, religious
organizations, and so on).
4. An in-depth view of selected forms of
non-household care provision (using qualitative research techniques)
While
labour force surveys provide macro-quantitative indicators on how various care
occupations have grown over the years, there is also a need for a more textured
analysis of some of these forms of care provision. The different care providers
include: domestic workers, nurses and other health sector workers, home-based
care workers; and non-household family carers (i.e. non-resident grandmothers,
daughters, daughters-in-laws providing care). For each of these significant
categories of worker the research will explore both how they give care and how
they receive care/organise care of self.
5. Policies and
programmes
Some policies and programmes have a direct and explicit intention
to provide care services that can substitute and/or complement unpaid care
provided by household members. This includes, for example, provision of care
services for young children (e.g. crèches and pre-schools), for the elderly, for
the chronically ill, and people with disabilities.
Other policies aim
explicitly to assist unpaid carers (only mothers, or mothers and fathers) to
care for the young by providing paid or unpaid leave from employment, with
varying levels of generosity; it could be maternalist (only mothers get the
“right to care” but not fathers) or transformative (both parents have the right
to care, and fathers in particular are encouraged to do so).
Pensions
and insurance systems may also include some care-related features: for example
in several European countries and in Japan “bonuses” or “credits” are provided
for individuals who provide unpaid care for children or adults needing
care.
In developing countries many of the above-mentioned policies are
poorly developed, and poorly implemented. But there are other social programmes
that are impacting on the care economy, such as cash transfers (child benefits,
pensions) and work programmes (employment guarantee and public works
programmes). Some of these programmes may not be about care, i.e. pensions are
not about care (they are about financing of old age when the person cannot
earn). But they may allow those who receive a pension to purchase care or to
receive care from their children because they can now use the pension to assist
the carer with some of her/his household needs (e.g. paying for school fees of
grandchildren). Other kinds of social programmes may have a larger and indirect
impact on care: for example health care assumes some of the responsibility for
the care of the elderly and chronically ill, while education services (schools)
also perform a care task with respect to children who are in school. Similarly,
changes in education programmes such as provision of school meals or continuous
day, could free up time that has been hitherto allocated to unpaid care work.
6. Valuing the unpaid and paid care sectors: A cross-country
comparison
The project is also developing a small number of simple
quantitative “macro” measures that would compare the size of the paid and unpaid
economies – and especially the care element of these economies – in the
different countries, using comparable data sets. In so doing, these measures
will give broad indications of the size of different parts of the “care
diamond”. Work in this area takes into account the nature and limitations of the
different data sources in the different countries. The aim is to derive
estimates that are not too complicated so that readers of the research can
relatively easily understand what has been done and what the findings mean.
The types of comparisons that will be explored include the
following:
· The value of total paid work in the economy versus value of
total unpaid work, including the sex breakdown for the total paid and
unpaid, with broad sub-categories within both paid and unpaid.
· The value
of unpaid care work compared with different types of tax revenue. This
comparison would support the argument that caring for others constitutes a type
of tax. Ordinary monetary taxes constitute a contribution that people are forced
to make to the welfare of society in general rather than for their own benefit,
and often includes a larger contribution by men than women (because of men’s
greater labour force participation and higher earnings). In contrast, unpaid
care work constitutes a contribution to general welfare, made primarily by
women.
· The value of unpaid care work compared with different types of
government expenditure on salaries. The chosen government expenditures would
be those which represent public care work, such as in schools and
hospitals.
· A measure of care produced by care workers falling within the
SNA (System of National Accounts) production boundary. This measure would be
based on the occupations recorded for workers in a survey such as a labour force
survey. Possible measures include the number of workers (male and female)
involved, the number of hours worked, and the income earned
· The value of
unpaid care work expressed as a percentage of gross domestic product
(GDP).
Sources of funding:
Partial funding for the project has
been secured from the International Development Research Centre (IDRC, Canada)
and Swiss Development Cooperation (SDC). Discussions are under way with a number
of other funding agencies.
Papers prepared:
· Razavi, Shahra.
The political and Social Economy of Care: Conceptual Issues, Research
Questions and Policy Options. (draft)
· Budlender, Debbie. A
Critical Review of Selected Time Use Surveys.
(draft)
Country-level Research teams:
· South
Africa: Debbie Budlender (Community Agency for Social Enquiry, Cape
Town); Frances Lund (Associate Professor, University of KwaZulu-Natal,
Durban).
· Tanzania: researchers being identified
·
Nicaragua: Isolda Espinosa (Independent consultant, Managua); Gilma
Tinoco, (Independent consultant, Managua)
· Argentina:
Valeria Esquivel (Universidad Nacional de General Sarmiento, Instituto de
Ciencias, Buenos Aires); Eleonor Faur (Universidad Nacional de General San
Martín and Instituto de Desarrollo Económico y Social, Buenos Aires).
·
South Korea: Huck- Ju Kwon (Sung Kyun Kwan University, Seoul); Mi-young
An (Handong Global University, School of Counseling, Psychology and Social
Welfare, Seoul); Ito Peng (Department of Sociology, University of Toronto)
·
India: Rajni Palriwala (Delhi School of Economics, New Delhi); Neetha
Pillai (Women’s Development Studies, New Delhi)
· Switzerland: Mascha
Madoerin (Independent consultant, Basel). Identification of collaborators
underway.
· Spain: researchers being identified
Advisory
Group:
A small advisory group has been set up to provide substantive
inputs on the research design and research reports. The members of the team are:
Marzia Fontana, Institute of Development Studies, Brighton, UK
Haris Gazdar, Collective for Social Science Research, Karachi,
Pakistan
James Heintz, PERI, University of Massachusetts, Amherst,
USA
Evelyne Huber, Department of Political Science, University of
North Carolina, USA
Elizabeth Jelin, IDES, Buenos Aires, Argentina
Thokozile Ruzvidzo, African Centre for Gender and Social Development,
United Nations Economic Commission for Africa, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.
For
more information, please use the links under Research Team to the right of the
page.