WUNRN
"In Search of
Economic Alternatives: Voices from
Download the electronic version of the paper from here
______________________________________________________________________
"We women need to be the torchlight for changing the ways in which we try to build gender equality, implement CEDAW and remove poverty. We have to change the macro-economic sky through our advocacy and knowledge."
Engaging with Economic Growth: Learning from the Ground
by Devaki Jain*
The global crisis sent the economies of the world, both rich and less so,
into a spin – destroying many spaces but also jolting ideas. It started waves of rethinking[1][1] on the ways that economies should trigger growth – it was like a wake-up
call. It is another matter that despite this deep distress, and the burst of
proposals for an alternative program, the “power” economists and economic
agencies have not transformed, and are only engaging with more of the same as a
response to healing the damage already done.
The Gross Domestic Product (GDP) growth rate has been one of the most accepted measures of progress, and with the embedding of globalization – not just the run of private capital but also the connectivity that the internet has provided – trade, both in goods and in services has become the most favoured engine of growth and indicators of economic success. Economic arguments drawn from free trade theory have capital hunting for the cheapest productive capacities. However, the so-called free trade agreements are not free; trade is tethered in highly controlled systems to benefit some at the cost of others, and so we should not use the words ‘free trade’ although the globalization model is based on the free trade theory, which argues that it maximizes the efficient use of factors of production at the lowest cost. So, global growth via foreign trade is or was the mantra.
In a world that is extremely
unequal in economic conditions and peoples, the
global factory as it is being called has shifted to the poorer in the
developing countries. And amongst the poorer of these countries, women are the
“preferred” labour as they are willing to accept insecure and hard work due to
their drive for the survival of their households. The export of goods and services from Asia have
been a source of income for women, whether as self-employed home-based workers
or as workers in Special Economic Zones (SEZ). However, I will never forget a
presentation made by a Thai trade union leader a few years ago, who showed how
Nike (the sportswear and sports equipment supplier) marched from one country to
another shifting its production units, driving down wages and negotiations
for the protection of workers. Every single country fell into line, flea eating
flea in a race to the bottom.
The recent downturn in the global economy has taught us that it this employment segment painfully vulnerable at the lower end. Even the last person – for e.g. the woman waste-picker – has been affected, as shown by many studies, the most striking of which was done by Women in Informal Employment Globalizing and Organizing (WIEGO) in collaboration with Self-Employed Women’s Association (SEWA). Due to the global crisis, the demand from China, the largest importer of the world’s waste, has gone down, resulting in a drop of the selling price of waste material by 40 to 80 percent in India and in a severe decrease of earnings of women waste pickers.
The crisis did however establish one structure that was in the
melting-pot[2][2] but had not really boiled, and that is
South-South configurations in economic bonding. The crisis hit the financial
markets and the employment sheds of the Northern countries harder than it did
many of the continents of the South – one could ironically say that the less
developed the banking and stock market systems, the better the survival of the
economy, as was proved by Latin America and some countries of Africa. Countries
like China and India, while quite developed in markets of capital and tradables,
could also maintain some growth of GDP and quick revival while the European
countries were lagging behind.
This difference further strengthened the South continents to attempt new configurations of economic clubs, trading preferences so that they could both release themselves from the demand pull for products by the North, seeing how volatile that was, Apart from shifting the direction of trade, i.e., exports from the formerly rich countries, there is a desire to find ways of trading which emancipate the region from the dependence, collectively reorder the power relationships, and build their own strength using their own large population demand spaces like in China. Regionalism then is emerging as a bulwark against globalism. And hence the extraordinary difference in the targeting of response, due to the particular relative autonomy of the region from the global run.
But as Asia and Latin America strengthen
themselves against North-driven tsunamis on their economies, are they thinking
of the women of the region? Or to put it differently, are the women of
the region engaged in these negotiations? Not as far as I can see.
Therefore, the first task is to engage with those configurations. What do the
organizations of women workers such as SEWA and others in the mode of advocacy
for women as workers have to say about the new arrangements and aspirations? We must look at the anatomy of those
arrangements and gender them from the top i.e., the managers of the plan, right
down to the implementation, including the flows of finance and the design
of laws – i.e., gendering the macro-economic sky. Most important is how the capital markets
roam, what they bite into, what arrangements should be made for the survival of
food farming, etc. – i.e. the macro-economic decisions and initiatives.
The time has come for us to shift our work and
our advocacy from looking for gender justice and explaining women’s
location (especially exploitation in the success story of trade), for e.g. as
experienced by India and China today, -- and asking for special considerations
within that framework -- towards arguing for another kind of view of
economic progress and prosperity; for a voice to direct the economies
usually called the Keynesian approach. This suggests that demand can be and
should be generated through a wide spread employment base, shifting from capital-led growth to wage-led
growth, and making decent work -- employment with a decent wage and security of
wage – the engine of growth. It is my view that we need to shift our language
-- from gender equality and other terminologies and objectives such as
Millennium Development Goals – towards ensuring securities: food, livelihood
and water security for women. This should be the responsibility of the State. States
are now all geared to ensure security against terror attacks, but it is these
“peace goods” that women want and should have, if there is seriousness in the
States’ commitments to ensure “inclusive growth.”
Hence, it is crucial at this time for feminists and the women’s movement to consolidate their knowledge on the how to of economic growth, identify new triggers of economic growth which enable more equitable outcomes, as well as to engage with these new arrangements to ensure that women as labour get a better deal through laws and other structural arrangements.
There is a need for laws across the region to
protect the workers as a community: for e.g., a regional minimum wage and a
regional approach to the capital that comes seeking. When SADEC (Southern
African Development Community) was looking for a way forward to get the region
to be a region, I had suggested that they draw up a plan with optimization of
employment as the goal of the model -- a regional employment plan which
investors and governments could follow such that there was a consolidation of
power as well as cooperation, to avoid the situation in the Nike example cited.
On another occasion, I had suggested that the
Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) set up its own CEDAW type of legislation especially
to protect South-South women migrants who often face grave bodily harm apart
from other forms of distress. I had pointed out that the major portion of
foreign exchange in countries like Sri Lanka and the Philippines comes from
women who emigrate as workers and yet their lives were not seen as precious by
the States.
That resonates what Mahatma Gandhi had proposed as the path for India’s second freedom, freedom from poverty for its people. His theory could be called the ‘bubbling-up theory of growth’ which counters the old ‘trickling-down theory of growth.’ The bubbling-up theory argues that the process of removal of poverty can itself be an engine of growth, that the incomes and capabilities of those who are currently poor have the potential to generate demand which in turn will engine production, but of goods that are immediately needed by the poor which are currently peripheral in production. The oiling, then, of this engine will bubble up and fire the economy, in a much more broad-based manner. Unlike export led growth, it will not skew production and trade into the elite trap, which is accentuating disparities and creating discontent.
This can also be coincided with regionalism suggesting that the goals of the regional trade compact would be to maximize employment in the region, so models can be built where the maximization would be employment, rather than merely foreign exchange.
Feminists have come up with many
well-reasoned policy ideas. For example, in India a Committee of Feminist Economists (CFE) who were consulted
by the National Planning Commission during the preparation of the Eleventh
Five-Year Plan (2007-2012) argued that women were India’s growth agents: they
were a strong presence in the economic sectors like agriculture, infrastructure
and informal productive sectors and much of the GDP came from their labour but
was not recognized in the public domain of the State. The CFE presentation to the National Planning
Commission had information on women’s contribution to savings and revenue despite
being increasingly excluded from formal finance sources: 60% of total savings
is from the informal sector with least access to financial savings.
One of the changes that
was a result of the CFE’s influence was that the chapter conventionally titled ‘Women and Development’ was
renamed ‘Women’s Agency and Child Rights’, enabling the shift from a ‘social
development’ perspective to one of agency and rights. They were able to influence the sectoral programs, such as
agriculture, infrastructure, health, employment, etc.. I am glad to report that their intervention and
inside-outside partnership, i.e. the presence of a feminist in the Planning
Commission, Dr. Syeda Hameed, made a striking difference to the design of the
11th Five-Year Plan.
Another recent initiative to which I am a party
is run by a group called the Casablanca Dreamers.[3][3] It is comprised of feminist scholars, authors and activists who come
from very varied regions, specialisations, generations and ideological
positions with tremendous experience and knowledge that made them experts in
various fields of development and political and social activism – all coming
together to create unique and valuable dialogue. The common thread was a deep
commitment to issues of social justice and equality, for women, for the poor,
for other excluded, oppressed and disenfranchised groups and communities.
This international group is attempting to
gender the macro-economic sky through shifting the basis of economic reasoning
and measuring progress drawn from ideas which have emerged from women’s
scholarship and activism. Assessing the Development Paradigm through
Women’s Knowledge, their goal is to go beyond fragmented assessment in
relation to particular goals and targets and to reflect more deeply on the kinds
of societies that are being created and the extent to which they can achieve
social and economic justice: calling for an interrogation and rebuilding of
concepts, measures and methods for achieving progress.
What I am trying to argue for is that we need
to move along now in our advocacy ways from gendering, which was most
useful in the previous decades up to around 2000, to reconstructing
macro-economic policies including regional and global economic arrangements, as
a lobby not only for women but for economic justice in an economic
democracy. It is good
news for feminists that the Nobel Prize for Economics has been shared with
Elinor Ostrom, who has challenged one of the very basic axioms put forth by
so-called mainstream economists and said that common property management by
communities is more efficient than by the State and the market.
We need to be the torchlight for changing the
ways in which we try to build gender equality, implement CEDAW and remove
poverty. We have to change the
macro-economic sky through our advocacy and knowledge.
================================================================
To contact the list administrator, or to leave the list, send an email to:
wunrn_listserve-request@lists.wunrn.com. Thank you.