WUNRN
Via Yumiko Yamamoto - Policy
Specialist, Inclusive Growth
Regional Bureau for Asia and the Pacific - UNDP
Feminist Economists Discuss Crises, Austerity & Gender
Equality
In the week that the EU
Troika were asking Greece to accept austerity measures and the Third Global
Conference on Financing for Development in Addis Ababa (FfD3) got closed with
an outcome document, which was expected to provide instruments for financing the post-2015 development agenda,
feminist economists from across the globe gathered in Berlin, Germany, and
discussed the gender equality in challenging times.
As
the panelists at the Opening Plenary of the 24th Annual Conference (16-18 July)
of the International Association for Feminist Economics discussed the
ongoing European crisis, those from Asia, Africa and Latin America wondered how
the European situation described is familiar to them. Indeed, one of the
speakers mentioned that austerity measures proposed to Greece have been known
as ’structural adjustments’ and that Europe can learn from experiences of the developing
South.
Professor
Joan Tronto of University of Minnesota, in her keynote speech entitled Migrant
Care Work & the Global Political Economy, pointed out that drudgery
work and unpaid care work, performed mainly by women, working class and migrants,
are not new.
“They
have been a part of modernity since its colonial beginning.” The poor/South
providing care to the rich/North resembles a master and servant relationship;
inequalities created in the neoliberal society is a colonial legacy, she explained,
answering that decolonization is needed.
Tronto,
speaking from her 2013 book Caring
Democracy, at the Roundtable
organized by Friedrich Ebert Stiftung at its Berlin office on 15 July 2015,
called for a new thinking of freedom and equality from the standpoint of making
caring more just. In a corporate world for example, work-life balance
policy puts production and economic life at the centre of our human lives.
Tronto says it should be the other way around.
If
we are able to commit ourselves caring for us and others by “accepting and
rethinking our caring responsibilities and providing sufficient resources for
care”, then we will be able to “enhance levels of trust, reduce levels of
inequality, and provide real freedom for all (p. 182).” This state of freedom
and the nature of needs and justice has been discussed as ‘basic human
capabilities’ (p. 162) by Amartya Sen and others.
Human
development is a process of enlarging people’s freedoms to live long and
healthy life, to be educated and to enjoy a decent standard of living. In both
Tronto’s framework as well as human development framework, people are both
beneficiaries and providers of such a just society.
Then,
the question was how we transform our current society to the just society?
Policy makers often say the cost of providing public services such as
education, health care, child care or elderly care is too expensive. However,
the “cost of not investing in care has not been evaluated,” said Ms. Soledad
Salvador of Centro Interdisciplinario de Estudios sobre el Desarrollo
(Interdisciplinary Center for Development Studies) in Uruguay at the
Roundtable.
Feminist
economists, together with other macroeconomists, have been supporting
innovative tax policy such as Tobin tax and good global governance for
combating tax evasion and tax avoidance so as to finance the necessary social
services and tackle debt crisis. Meanwhile, many countries are locked in a
‘race to the bottom’ by reducing corporate tax rates and other means of
progressive taxation to attract investment and global financial capital.
On
the other hand, some countries were asked to undertake austerity measures when
they need to have economic stimulus. With austerity measures, social sectors
that are responsible for health, education, pension etc. often face public
spending cut first, resulting in an increase of burden of the poor and women.
This
year’s Feminist Economics conference attracted many European scholars and
development practitioners partly because it was held in a European city. What
they described about European crises—debt crisis, financial crisis, migration
crisis, care crisis and democracy crisis etc. are not foreign to Asia.
Recently
some Asian currencies have been depreciated to the level of the 1998 financial
crisis. While remittance has been seen as a significant contribution to poverty
reduction, negative social impacts have been also recognized. Illegal migration
and trafficking remain an issue. Youth unemployment and underemployment
persisted even among those with higher education despite a rapid growth.
We
shall not treat the sustainable development goals as aspirations. Crises are
not someone else’s problem.
It is time to care for one another.