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Engendering Macroeconomics
Isabella Bakker
It is now a truism to say that we are undergoing a fundamental change in societies of both the global North and South. This change is fuelled by powerful economic forces often referred to as globalization. More specifically, this is a process of restructuring in the West and structural adjustment in the so-called South. This process, as Stephen Gill has outlined, is marked by a dominant system of global political economy which he calls "disciplinary neo-liberalism". Markets discipline so-called economic agents through discursive claims about investor confidence and the stability of economic systems. Economies are portrayed as self-regulating and depoliticised, inverting Keynes' idea that democratic politics should always be privileged over economic forces. This disembedding process means that the market not only frees itself from society but also imposes its logic upon politics.
Gender-sensitive Budgets
For feminist economists women's position at the crossroads of production and reproduction leads to many views of markets ranging from support, to ambivalence, to deep suspicion. Critical feminist economics, which offers a home to a number of heterodox approaches to economics, questions whether markets are a reliable means of mobilizing resources for production and an effective means of meeting needs. For one, markets as social institutions are inevitably structured asymmetrically to the advantage of some participants over others. The UNDP's Gender Development Index (GDI) (1) is one important statistical indicator which shows the difference between capabilities and opportunities for women in societies around the globe. Second, while markets entail opportunities they also involve risk such as unemployment and changes in demand for certain goods. So in order to counteract market insecurity, non-market safety nets (kin, community, state provisions) are seen as necessary. This insight highlights one of the limits of a purely production-oriented approach to political and economic globalization. Non-market relations are key to gauging the nature and depth of the globalization process as it plays itself out in the daily lives of real people, of women and men.
Feminist scholars and activists in the North and the South have begun to concentrate on 'engendering' the main economic debates of the day. This means making visible the gendered underpinnings of traditional macroeconomic policies; making an argument for social investment; and showing that not all burdens can be transferred to the unpaid economy without resulting human and economic costs. Gender-sensitive budgets represent a transition from advocacy to accountability: they audit government budgets for their impact on women and girls, men and boys. Some are conducted from within government (Australia, for example) and some are outside government or a combination of the two as is the case in South Africa where The Women's Budget Initiative (WBI) started in 1995 as a joint effort of parliamentarians and non-governmental organisations.
Gender-sensitive budget exercises such as those conducted in South Africa for the last three years offer the possibility for revealing the contradictions of the impositional claims of disciplinary neo-liberalism in a concrete manner. Such claims are marked by attempts to redirect women's economic dependency from the public to the private sphere and the rhetoric of reform - whether it be legal or social or budgetary - is being cast as increasingly individualizing. The problem of child poverty in North America, for instance, is being reduced to an individualized problem of deadbeat dads rather than a systemic question requiring a collective response. (2)
Gender-sensitive budgets potentially begin to challenge, in coalition with other groups such as environmentalists, poverty advocates and trade unionists, the viability of the current fiscal disciplinarity of international financial players. The United Nations Development Programme has recently sponsored a Workshop on "Pro-poor, Gender- and Environment-Sensitive Budgets" (June 1999), which brought together for the first time, a variety of participatory budget initiatives and those interested in such projects. (3)
Globalization and Care
Gender-sensitive budgets also reflect an ethical dimension in that they challenge what is wealth and how it is created. Studies of globalization and its impact on people focus on incomes, employment, education, and other opportunities. Less visible, and often neglected, is the impact on care and caring labour the task of providing for dependants, for children, the sick, the elderly and (do not forget) all the rest of us, exhausted from the demands of daily life. Economic analysis of care offers three insights into the impact of globalization on human development:
Women's increased participation
in the labour force and shifts in economic structures are transforming the way
care services are provided. Needs once provided almost exclusively by unpaid
family labour are now being purchased from the market or provided by the state.
Increases in the scope and speed of transactions are increasing the size of
markets, which are becoming disconnected from local communities. As market relationships
become less personal, reliance on families as a source of emotional support
tends to increase just as they are becoming less stable economically and
demographically.
Perhaps most important, the expansion of markets tends to penalize altruism
and care. Both individuals and institutions have been free-riding on the caring
labour that mainly women provide. Whether women will continue to provide such
labour without fair remuneration is another matter. (4)
It is through direct engagement with neo-liberal forces at the national (Departments of Finance)and international (International Monetary Fund, World Trade Organisation) levels that the new impositional claims of the new gender-neutral, self-reliant citizen and atomistic market player are being challenged and potentially, transformed. Engendering economics is a necessary, though not sufficient, aspect of this process. We need better analysis but we also need better processes that reflect a genuine dialogue rather than technocratic discussions of the 'art of the possible'.
Isabella Bakker is Professor of Political Science at York University,
Toronto, Canada; contact per email:
isabella.bakker@undp.org
The text is a shorted version of a paper prepared for the conference ‚Feminist
Perspectives on the Paradoxes of Globalization', organised by Research Group
on Globalization, Sustainability and Gender, Dept. Of Political Science, Free
University of Berlin, Heinrich Böll Stiftung, November 5-6, 1999.
(1) The GDI adjusts the Human Development Index (HDI) for gender - the average
achievement of each country in life expectancy, educational attainment and income
in accordance with the disparity in achievement between women and men.
(2) Bakker, Isabella and Janine Brodie. 1995. The New Canada health and Social
Transfer: The implications for Women. Ottawa. Status of Women Canada
(3) see website;
www.undp.org/poverty/events/budgets_wk.html
(4) Source: UNDP, Human Development Report 1999, New York: Oxford University
Press, pp. 77&79.