Programa del congreso

Human capabilities, which enable societies to flourish, are primarily produced by women in their households. Yet the monetary value of the resources that women and households mobilize to produce care remains unknown.

To address this gap, this study develops the Basic Care Basket (BCB), a synthetic indicator that aims to estimate the costs of care production from the perspective of families and women. The BCB has two dimensions. The empirical dimension shows the volume, composition, and monetary value of the resources that families with at least one child up to 12 years old mobilize to produce care. The normative dimension establishes a threshold below which the production of sufficient quality family care becomes unfeasible. This threshold determines the monetary value of the resources that families require to fulfill their needs without jeopardizing women’s economic autonomy and/or child development.

By focusing on households, the BCB makes visible the free work that millions of people, particularly women, do every day to manage and assemble the goods and services required to produce care. Sufficient and high-quality care enables children to access other care services that societies allocate to the development of their capabilities—for instance, health and education—so that they can later lead independent lives.

The BCB is estimated by introducing new intelligence on three data sources already available, namely the Household Income and Expenditure Survey, Time Use Surveys and data on public spending.

In this study, we will present the conceptual and methodological framework of the BCB based on its two dimensions and discuss its contributions. We will also introduce the initial findings of the BCB estimations for Argentina, discuss the application of the indicator in the Argentinian municipality of Santa Fe and provide details on its scalability. The local pilot will provide evidence on the relevance of installing the BCB in public statistics systems and its potential to characterize deficits in care resources and inform the implementation of care policies.

The reasons for low labourforce participation rates (LFPR) for women in India, the enabling mechanisms for improving LFPR is widely discussed in research and development practices. Measuring women’s work better by redefining and expanding the concept of ‘work’ as well as innovating methods of enumeration and survey designs to capture women’s work better is also gaining prominence in academic discourses. It is in this context this paper attempts to examine a complex concept of women’s willingness to participate in the labourforce, where the concept of ‘willingness’ is defined as ‘interest to work subject to availability of suitable opportunities’.

Long periods of non-availability of jobs have had a discouraged worker effect leading to a large number of women being pushed out of the labourforce – that is neither employed nor seeking work. However, out of labourforce women may still be ‘willing’ to work provided certain conditions are fulfilled. In this paper we emphasise the importance of measuring women’s ‘willingness’ and not just employment status, to participate in the labourforce.

The paper examines the barriers and challenges influencing women’s willingness to work. The findings reveal that around 57% women reported responsibilities in the care economy to be the reason for their lack of willingness to join the labour force. Around 26% cite household chores and 17% cite childcare responsibilities to be some of the major barriers to work. Women also reported elderly care as a barrier to join work even if there is willingness. Those women with some form of skilling, belonging to younger, unmarried cohorts, marginalised caste groups, and households with more than one female member were more willing to join the workforce as compared to others.

The paper uses data from a large-scale household survey of 5000 women across 5 major states of India. The study was conducted by IWWAGE (Krea University, India) during the period of November 2021 to February 2022, and aimed to understand the factors leading to women dropping out/withdrawing from the labourforce. The methodologies consist of descriptive statistics, multinomial and binary logit regressions.

The paper concludes that willingness is a complex concept to capture and factors influencing women’s willingness are aligned with what prevents women from joining the labourforce in general. However, willingness is a better measure to reflect the inadequacy of job availability for women which has an impact on their long term labour market decisions.

The COVID-19 pandemic has adversely affected global health systems and is expected to have severe, long-lasting consequences for several developmental outcomes such as maternal health and family planning services. This is true particularly of low-and-middle income countries that were behind in terms of sexual and reproductive health indicators before the pandemic began in early 2020. In this study we present new evidence of the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on contraception access, access to institutional deliveries, and access to pre-natal and ante-natal care in India, using evidence from the latest wave (2019-21) of the National Family Health Survey (NFHS). We also explore the explanatory role of women’s intrahousehold decision-making power.

Novel to our study is its focus on movement restrictions rather than infection outbreak. India presents an important and unique context to test the effect of movement restriction on the aforementioned outcomes for two reasons: (1) the country faced one of the strictest lockdowns worldwide in the early stage of the pandemic, which was enforced without much warning; (2) the nationwide lockdown was followed-up by geographically calibrated movement restrictions about a month later; this shift in containment strategy allows us to test the sensitivity of our outcome variables with movement restriction.

We use a difference-in-differences empirical strategy. The results show that the nationwide lockdown had a strong negative effect on all our outcomes, especially in access to maternal healthcare services and contraception access. Contraception access, and access to antenatal and prenatal care services in green zone (least movement restrictions) districts improved significantly after lifting movement restrictions on 1 May 2020. However, post-pandemic access to contraception and maternal health services remained significantly lower than the pre-pandemic level.

We further assess the role of women’s intrahousehold decision-making power in determining their reproductive health outcomes. We show that women’s baseline decision-making power with respect to their sexual and reproductive health has a significant role to play in their post-pandemic reproductive health outcomes. For several women in India, autonomy with respect to contraception use and childbirth is restricted. We find that in districts where women reported that sexual and reproductive health related decisions were not entirely their own, had worse outcomes in the red zone districts (highest movement restrictions) as compared to green zone districts.

The concept of reproductive justice was first developed by organized women of color in the United States in the late 90s and gained increased relevance in academia and grassroots movements worldwide, but a clear framework on how to approach reproductive justice within economics is not yet developed. This paper aims to start that theoretical discussion. We provide an overview of the reproductive justice framework and advocate for its adoption as a Lakatosian research program in economics, proposing one hardcore and four softcore hypotheses. To develop a proper method capable of investigating those hypotheses simultaneously, we propose a synthesis among elements of analysis advanced by development economics, feminist economics, and stratified economics literature. We provide a selected historical example to apply the framework, illuminating how it advances economists’ understanding and evaluation of reproductive policies and their consequences in diverse scenarios, and discuss the relevance and possible tensions of such applications in future analyses.