If Women Counted…
by Jen Lexmond
In amongst the canapés, wine, and speeches at Demos’s 16th birthday party last week, I wandered into a conversation about feminist economics. We were discussing a particular Kiwi Economist and former MP, Marilyn Waring.
Waring is best known for her critique of the UN’s chosen measure of economic productivity - GDP. A set of rules and regulations set by the UN System of National Accounts provides an international statistical standard that all countries must abide by in determining what processes and transfers are considered economically productive. These National Accounts are used as the basis for setting international economic policy and strategy.
The crux of her argument is that these rules capture value in destructive activities like war, or cutting down rainforests, while rendering productive activities like child-rearing and informal labour valueless. Why is a man’s ‘work’ sitting in a nuclear control room and staring at a red button all day considered economically productive while a woman’s work walking 10 miles to a well every morning to sustain her family and maintain her home counts for nothing?
The same concept applies to the environment: why does a tree rooted in the ground, consuming carbon dioxide and providing oxygen have no value according to UN, but when it is cut down, stripped and turned into timber, its value skyrockets?
It seems to me that if these rules were adapted to accurately reflect the value of the environment and the productive work of women and carers, it would instantly beef up the economy (statistics show that unpaid work counted for around a third of Canada’s GDP for example), be a lot easier to both incentivise green economies and to achieve equal societies built on an ethic of care as well as wealth.
What better moment than the current economic crisis to start talking about this again. Calling Marilyn Waring to the stage…
Adam Huxley
(Re) claiming the National Accounts
….I’ll push to the front for the Marilyn Waring gig. Her challenge to conventional economics to account for the role of women in economic life is an important one and her long term quest to change the system of National Accounts has never been timelier.
On both counts, Waring seems to have made some surprising allies ….the statisticians who actually compile and process the data for the system of National Accounts.
As set out in the Istanbul Declaration (2007), the international statistics community acknowledge an emerging consensus that we must redefine what societal progress means and go beyond conventional economic measures such as GDP per capita to measure it.
The UK‘s Office of National Statistics has been leading some of this work.
At the Demos birthday party I heard from one of the speakers, ‘the Conservatives won the economic argument in 80’s and in the 90’s Labour won the social argument’. Coming out of the current economic crisis, the next decade must surely be about the integration of economic, social and environmental concerns into the National Accounts.
Such a set of official statistics would be a key public good/part blue-print for fostering a low-carbon, equitable future.