Growth/GDP as measure rely on gendered divisions of labor and environmental exploitation

(Sarah, GlobalDevelopment@NewSouthWales, Naila, Gender&Development@LSE, From economic growth to a wellbeing economy: notes for a feminist foreign policy chrome-extension://efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/https://iwda.org.au/assets/files/Wellbeing-and-Feminist-Foreign-Policy-AFFPC-Issue-Paper-11-1-1.pdf)

This issues paper explores the idea of a feminist economy of wellbeing and how progress towards such an economy might be measured. To understand why a new concept of the economy is being argued for, a good place to start is to ask what it is intended to replace. The answer is, the growth-driven economy. Currently, the dominant approach to measuring a country’s growth is changes in its Gross Domestic Product, a single metric constructed to measure the size of economy and one that, to paraphrase Coyle (2015)i, has come to play a central role in the policies that structure people’s lives and livelihoods, dominates political debates and can make and break governments. In this paper, we discuss the meanings ascribed to the GDP and what it does and does not measure. We track some of the ways in which critics have engaged with GDP as a measure of growth, and the growth paradigm that is both embodied and promoted. We bring a feminist perspective to these debates, examining moves towards wellbeing as an alternative to growth, both as a goal and a measure of progress, and different efforts to measure it. By way of conclusion, we join the calls being made at the international level to find ‘beyond-GDP’ measures of progress. 1. The GDP: the power of a statistic The GDP refers to all the final goods and services in a country that have been exchanged in the marketplace, that can thus be valued at their market price, and their aggregate value expressed as a single number. Per capita GDP is the same statistic averaged across the population. GDP is used not only to measure the marketed value of goods and services produced in a country in a particular period of time but also the size and direction of change over time – whether GDP grew, shrank or remained constant. The concept’s origins date back to the inter-war period when governments in the United States (US) and the United Kingdom (UK) sought a unified measure of national output to assist in macro-economic policy making. It took on international significance in the post war period when the UN, drawing on the expertise of a Group of five (male) National Income Experts from the US and the UK, began setting up country-based Systems of National Accounts for the collection of internationally comparable dataii. This required determining the boundary between productive and unproductive activities. The early definition of the boundary reflected its origins in advanced industrial countries: it would include all marketed activities as well as ‘household activities that are clearly akin to those that are usually undertaken in enterprises’ while excluding ‘those for which the analogy with enterprises becomes tenuous’. This excluded a great deal of the non-monetary production that was carried out, most often by women, for their households’ own consumptioniii. In response to subsequent critiques, the production boundary was gradually expanded to include more categories of non-market goods produced for household consumption, with value imputed to them on the basis of market prices. What continued to be excluded were the unpaid services that went into the daily and intergenerational care of family members – cooking, washing, cleaning and looking after children, the elderly, sick and disabled members, the basis of what is now described as the ‘care economy’. These were seen as governed by norms rather than market signals, difficult to assign a value to and considered to have very little impact on the market economy. The reliance on apparently neutral market signals to assign value to production included in GDP led proponents to consider it an objective, value-free indicator. However, as Waring (1988)iv, an early and pioneering feminist economist, pointed out, there was constant slippage between using prices to measure value and using prices to confer value. As a result, who and what was included in GDP served to define who and what was valued. Despite warnings by one of the original architects that ‘the welfare of a nation can scarcely be inferred from a measurement of the national income as defined by the GDP’v, GDP came to be treated as a measure of national welfare. Principal critiques of GDP focus on its limitations as a measure of national production and its misplaced conflation with national welfare. First, GDP excludes various services that undoubtedly create value for families but are provided on an unpaid basis by family members, most often women, rather than purchased from the market. They include activities such as meal preparation and cleaning, care of family members, and voluntary or community services. Given that GDP uses market prices to impute value to material goods produced for family consumption rather than for sale, the continued exclusion of unpaid care services is highly arbitrary since there are markets in many of these services. It also places those who provide these services on a full-time basis outside the labour force, classifying them as ‘economically inactive’. Feminists have built on Margaret Reid’s idea of the ‘third party principle’ to offer a more consistent definition of work, one that includes tasks that contribute to social reproduction and the maintenance of the labour force but might not be directly connected with market forces. This defines work as purposeful activity that is a) carried out with the objective of producing a valued good or service and b) that can, in principle, be delegated to someone elsevivii. This distinguishes work from other purposeful activities that people have to perform for themselves (such as eating and sleeping) and leisure activities (such as watching a movie or gardening for pleasure). Second, the natural environment is factored into the measurement of GDP on a very partial basis. Natural resources exchanged in market activity are counted, but not the destructive impact of activities such as logging and mining on the environment or the renewability of the resources in question. Likewise, no use value is attached to natural resources not exchanged in the market, such as common property resources that underpin subsistence livelihoods and on which women are often disproportionately dependent given their more limited access to markets, or the ecological services and aesthetic benefits provided by clean air, unpolluted rivers and flourishing forests. Third, by focusing on what is marketed, GDP both excludes goods and services of recognizable value that are not marketed, and includes goods and services of dubious value, and indeed destructive in their impacts, because they are. As Waring put it, GDP valorised a system that 'counts oil spills and wars as contributors to economic growth while child-rearing and housekeeping are deemed valueless' viii And finally, while GDP can be regarded as a reasonably accurate measure of the marketed production of an economy, it provides no insight into the distribution of income generated by this production. It is perfectly possible, and frequently observed, that a rising GDP is accompanied by rising levels of inequality. To this, feminists have added some of the ways in which gender differentiates the income inequalities that are ignored by GDP. For instance, there are gender inequalities in the distribution of paid and unpaid work: women carry out at least two and a half times more unpaid household and care work than men.ix This is part of the explanation for the persistence of gender inequalities in wages earned. While the global gender gap in monthly earnings was 21%x, differences varied from a high of 47% in Sierra Leone to a low of -6.6 in the Philippines (one of only two of 73 countries to report a negative gap).