Nancy Folbre: Accounting for Care – Toward a Feminist Macroeconomics

Am 30. Oktober 2014 hat der 6. Österreichische Workshop Feministischer Ökonom*innen (FemÖk) an der Johannes Kepler Universität stattgefunden. Dort hat Nancy Folbre, Professorin an der University of Massachusetts und eine der international bedeutendsten feministischen Ökonominnen, ihre Keynote gehalten. Unter dem Titel „Accounting for Care – Toward a Feminist Macroeconomics“ erzählte Folbre über die Bedeutung von Care-Arbeit im Macroökonomischen System.

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Accounting for Care – Toward a Feminist Macroeconomics: Recent feminist research emphasizes that women’s specialization in care for others helps explain their lower wages and reduced bargaining power. Failure to account for the value of unpaid care in the national income accounts and macroeconomic models contributes to this problem, rendering many of women’s contributions invisible and seemingly irrelevant to economic growth. This paper makes a case for redefinition of basic categories of income, consumption, and investment to include the value of unpaid work, intra-family transfers, and the production of human capital. It also establishes the empirical feasibility of this approach.

Nancy Folbre is a feminist economist who focuses on economics and the family, non-market work and the economics of care. She is currently an economics professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.