Relationship between economic activity and development potential

• planning and estimations;
• agricultural policies;
• policies affecting informal sector
• research: e.g., study of savings and consumption patterns, household dynamics
• time poverty issues
• Policy benefits: good data leads to better policy

Historical forces

Urbanization, migration (comes with industrialization, ‘development’)

• ‘Push’ and ‘pull’ factors
• Rural vs urban life and adjustment
• International migration
• Those who stay behind?

Sectors affecting women

• Subsistence-we’ve talked a bit about this one …
• Domestic-labor within the household, unpaid
• Volunteer-rotating labor associations, RoSCAs-what’s the difference between volunteering for a charity and making a financial donation?
• Informal

What is the informal sector?

• Unregistered with tax authorities (don’t pay taxes)
• self-employment
• ease of entry
• scale
• labor-intensive
• access issues (market, credit, labor)

Where things get counted makes a difference

The same jobs can be done, for instance cooking, sewing, cleaning:

• for pay in the formal sector,
• irregularly in the informal sector for pay, and
• in the domestic sector for no pay,
• How we measure economic activity affects perceived size of economy

Factors influencing participation

• gender (the lowest wage, non-managerial jobs)
• formal education (least educated)
• age (young and productive)
• ethnicity (ethnic minorities prevail)

Why is this important?

• growing fast
• gendered
• safety valve for many on margins
• unregulated, insecure
• less visible

Factory work

• ‘free trade zones’ (taxes reduced, regulations eased, for factories)
• ‘capital flight’ (how much profit re-invested when production is for export?)
• Ownership can matter (multinationals vs nationals–less pressure on nationals, e.g., Bangladesh factory collapse)
• Role of patriarchy in ensuring docile, low-wage working class of poor women and girls
• Are these more than ‘jobs?’ Do they transform relations, women’s economic welfare?

Women and international migration: A more recent trend (from Hochschild)

• The ‘brain drain‘–what is it?
• The ‘care drain’–how different?
• Increasing inequality between North and South–e.g., North countries on average 46 times richer in 1980, versus 20 times richer in 1960; sixty countries worse off economically in 1999 than in 1980;
• Professional women in the North vs South–personal choice, or structural pressures?
• Underemployment in the South–the ‘push’ factor (what’s the ‘pull?’ Incentives to hire women from the South?)–avg age of 29 years for those immigrating to US; most have children
• Value of care, passing it on to other caregivers, like a chain
• Single mothers seem to predominate; women from third world seen as more ‘caring,’ ‘loving’
• Care as decontextualized (removed from its context, in other words–those who provide it, those who provide care for them, what’s required to immigrate, etc.)
• Extraction of ‘services’ versus goods, but still the flow is from South to North
• Development as a ‘push’ factor (as well as underdevelopment)

• Market street life
• Dakha street scene
• Lagos street scene
• from a taxi
• food vendors on a public bus
• street food
• Mumbai

 Graphs:

• As income grows, what happens to inequality?
• As countries urbanize, what happens to CO2 emissions?
• Do tax revenues increase with growth of ag sector?
• Women, agriculture and industry