This website uses cookies.

By clicking the "Accept" button or continuing to browse our site, you agree to first-party and session-only cookies being stored on your device to enhance site navigation and analyze site performance and traffic. For more information on our use of cookies, please see our Privacy Policy.

  1. Home
  2. ASSA Annual Meeting
  3. 2022
  4. Preliminary Program
  5. Global Capitalism and Gender Relations
« Back to Results

Global Capitalism and Gender Relations

Paper Session

Saturday, Jan. 8, 2022 3:45 PM - 5:45 PM (EST)

Hosted By: Union for Radical Political Economics & International Association for Feminist Economics
  • Chair: Sirisha Naidu, University of Missouri-Kansas City

Industrial Policy, Gender, and Technological Change in Indonesia

Shaianne Osterreich
,
Ithaca College

Abstract

Neoliberal consensus would have emerging semi-industrializing countries maintain very few barriers to trade and FDI. However, persistent structural gaps in technological capacity between the global north and south lead to trade patterns that often reinforce these gaps. This often means that for emerging industrializers, export oriented foreign firms will import high tech intermediate goods to drive productivity increases and further cost reduction. This pattern often leaves the highly gendered global manufacturing employment in emerging economies vulnerable to shifts in innovation that take place elsewhere in the global value chain.

Industrial policies that confront the power structure of global value chains, for example local content rules, hypothetically work to narrow structural gaps. However, if they are to be successful, they must be planned alongside gender aware employment policies and protections, as well as social infrastructure enhancements that allow for inclusive social upgrading.

This paper explores these topics through an integrated analysis of Indonesia’s industrial policy, gendered employment patterns, and technological change in manufacturing. Indonesia’s industrial policy has often included restrictions on trade or FDI meant to foster domestic capacity building, including local content rules on key strategic sectors including energy and several manufacturing sectors. However, there has been little in the way of investment in gender sensitive social structures necessary to foster equitable growth, which limits the power of the provisions to accomplish their stated goals.

How Does Time Use Data Shape a Gendered Understanding of Class? A Feminist Political Economy of Indian Time Use Data

Sirisha Naidu
,
University of Missouri-Kansas City

Abstract

The literature on agrarian change in India has largely employed class categories based upon data on land, assets and occupational status. Land and asset data tend to exist at the level of households. Indicators of occupation have neither fully counted unpaid reproductive labor nor accounted for diversified livelihood strategies. As a result, categorizations of class in the literature on agrarian change tend to collapse women’s class relations into those of male household heads. The recent completion of India’s first ever national time use survey provides an opportunity to address these longstanding gaps. This paper examines whether and how the 2019 Indian Time Use data lends itself to an understanding of class relations that i)can better accommodate an expanded conception of work as including reproductive labor ii) better accommodate the highly diversified livelihoods of rural Indians iii) better grasp the co-constitution of caste, gender and class. We compare the class relational mapping obtained from time use data with that obtained from land and occupational data, and examine the possibilities and limits of employing time use data to deepen feminist political economy analyses of agrarian change.

Manifestos and Destinies: Which Way to Radical Democracy?

Marianne Hill
,
University of Southern Maine

Abstract

As the worst of the COVID-19 pandemic draws to a close in several countries, demands for a new socioeconomic
order post-pandemic are growing in strength. This paper examines several recently-published manifestos and
political agendas that offer varying visions of an imagined sustainable, more equitable society. I ask the following
questions: what are common themes in these documents? what are differences that are significant? to what
extent will these differences hinder movement toward radical (deep) democracy and a sustainable society in which
all can flourish?
Values espoused in these documents include:
democracy/voice (as in democratizing the workplace, and electoral politics);
community/care/solidarity (caring for one another as a core value of our institutions);
equality/fairness (ensuring that every person has the support needed to thrive); and
sustainability.
Some manifestos are explicitly anticapitalist, including Feminism for the 99%. Others deliberately avoid
that label, including the US Social Forum. Most do not mention unpaid care work, and racial justice often gets only
a nod. Many include what Chantal Mouffe refers to as radical demands, that is, demands that cannot be met under
capitalism. Movement groups have different radical demands, depending on their focus.
Mouffe and other critical theorists argue that radical demands — whether of environmentalists, feminists,
labor activists or other movements — can form the basis for the growth of a broad-based progressive populism.
This populism, in turn, could lead to radical (deep) democracy under which capitalist elite no longer dominate
legislative agendas and hegemonic understandings change. People- and planet-centered agendas would become
the focus of agonistic, not antagonistic, debate. I examine which demands in recent manifestos and documents
could be considered to be radical demands. And, if so, I question whether these demands in fact offer the basis for
the consolidation of left populism.

China Shock and Female Labor Market Participation in Brazil

Juliana Cristofani
,
Federal University of ABC

Abstract

This paper explores the variation of China Shock between Brazilian local labor markets to identify whether Chinese
international trade expansion was able to improve the female labor market conditions in Brazil between 2000 and
2013. The identification strategy used was developed by Autor et al. (2013) and Costa et al. (2016), creating
variables that relate the changes in trade flows between Brazil and China to Brazilian employment outcomes.
This paper uses administrative data from the Ministry of Labor (RAIS) and information about the trade flows
between Brazil and China from the BACI database. The unit of measure of this analysis is the microregion, which is
a grouping of economically integrated municipalities, allowing the use of a panel data structure for the
estimations. To check female labor market conditions, the paper explores female formal employment and female
to male wage ratio. We also control by microregional factors such as age, schooling, average wages of the formal
labor force, and a cubic polynomial of income per capita, during the initial period.
Our results suggest that the China shock reduced the proportion of female formal employment at the microregion
level, with the effects of the imports channel being relatively more adverse than those of exports. Contrarily, in
microregions most affected by the Chinese imported goods influx female to male wage ratio increased 2
percentage points. While in microregions that expanded their exports to China in greater volumes, the results
were inconclusive.
JEL Classifications
  • F6 - Economic Impacts of Globalization
  • B5 - Current Heterodox Approaches