BRAUNSTEIN

International Journal of Political Economy
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Estimating the Role of Social Reproduction in

Economic Growth
Elissa Braunstein, Stephanie Seguino & Levi Altringer
To cite this article: Elissa Braunstein, Stephanie Seguino & Levi Altringer (2021) Estimating the
Role of Social Reproduction in Economic Growth, International Journal of Political Economy,
50:2, 143-164, DOI: 10.1080/08911916.2021.1942963
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INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF POLITICAL ECONOMY
2021, VOL. 50, NO. 2, 143–164
https://doi.org/10.1080/08911916.2021.1942963
Estimating the Role of Social Reproduction in

Economic Growth
Elissa Braunsteina, Stephanie Seguinob, and Levi Altringera
a
Department of Economics, Colorado State University, Fort Collins, Colorado, USA; bDepartment of Economics,
University of Vermont, Burlington, Vermont, USA
ABSTRACT KEYWORDS
Do investments in social reproduction, or the time and commodities that it Feminist economics;
takes to produce and maintain the labor force, actually matter for the rate structuralist macroeconom-
of economic growth? Using a Kaleckian macroeconomic model that incor- ics; social reproduction;
gender and growth; gender
porates gender and care provisioning, this article seeks to empirically and macroeconomics
evaluate this question. With panel data for a set of 121 countries between
1991 and 2015, the article uses principal component analysis to generate JEL CLASSIFICATIONS
estimates of social reproduction regime by country, and then applies these B5; O4; J1
estimates in growth regression analysis. Results indicate that the pressure
on women’s care time that comes with their increasing labor-force partici-
pation—absent strong social and more gender-egalitarian supports for
care provisioning—compromises investment and growth. In economies
where those supports for social reproduction exist, the increasingly out-
ward-oriented and market-driven macro structures and policies that prevail
across a variety of countries, including those associated with financializa-
tion, are shown to constrain investment in human capacities and long-run
productivity growth. In mutual social reproduction regimes, greater gender
equality in the labor market and in the distribution of responsibilities for
care also stimulates economic growth, while regimes built on the exploit-
ation of women’s labor in these domains generate lower growth.
Introduction
Over the last two decades, macroeconomists have turned their attention to exploring the role of
gender in the macroeconomy. Mainstream models tend to focus on supply-side factors, exploring
the positive relationship between gender equality in human capital and labor-force participation
and productivity growth. Conversely, feminist heterodox models in the structuralist tradition
combine these supply-side features with the contention that economies are often demand con-
strained. These approaches show how gender inequality in the labor market also structures aggre-
gate demand, with consequences for growth and development.
Missing from both these more mainstream and heterodox models of gender and growth has
been an accounting of the role of care and social reproduction—the time and commodities it
takes to produce, maintain, and invest in the labor force. Braunstein, van Staveren, and Tavani
(2011) developed the first macro model to fill this gap, building up a structuralist framework that
puts the distribution of production and reproduction by both gender and class (reflected in the
functional distribution of income) at the center of a model of economic growth and development.
The result is a set of stylized regimes connecting social reproduction and economic growth.
CONTACT Elissa Braunstein elissa.braunstein@colostate.edu Department of Economics, Colorado State University, Fort
Collins, Colorado, USA.
ß 2021 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC
144 E. BRAUNSTEIN ET AL.
These regimes are based on the interaction between a demand side, where macro structures and
policies drive investment (including investment in the labor force or human capacities) and
growth, and a supply side driven by the distribution of social reproduction between women, men,
capital, and the state.
This article empirically evaluates the predictions of the Braunstein, van Staveren, and Tavani
(2011) model using growth regression analysis. After a review of the gender and growth literature,
it begins by sketching out the theoretical and methodological connections between social repro-
duction with economic growth. Building on the empirical approach developed in Braunstein,
Bouhia, and Seguino (2019), we estimate a 121-country panel of social reproduction regimes, and
then use these estimates in panel growth regressions for the period 19912015. Results indicate
that how societies organize social reproduction matters for growth. More specifically, the pressure
on women’s care time that comes with their increasing labor-force participation—absent strong
social and more gender-egalitarian supports for care provisioning—compromise investment and
growth. However, even in economies that provide strong supports for care provisioning, increas-
ingly outward-oriented and market-driven macro structures and policies, including those associ-
ated with financialization, are shown to constrain growth. These findings are particularly relevant
to and inform macroeconomic policies in developing countries, where targeted government and
donor budget allocations are crucial to achieving success.
Macroeconomic Frameworks for Exploring the Role of Gender and Social

Reproduction
Since the 1980s, which witnessed a period of structural adjustment programs imposed on many
developing countries, feminist economists have assiduously explored the unintended impacts of
macrolevel policies on gender equality and women’s care burden. Diane Elson (1995) summarized
the importance and key takeaway of this work, noting that macro policies might not reach their
goals if negative gender effects of such policies were ignored. That body of work continues to
expand to consider the gender effects of a host of macrolevel policies including globalization,
monetary policy, and austerity.1
This work also led feminist economists to develop both formal models and empirical tests of
the feedback effects of gender equality or inequality on economic growth and development. A
number of international institutions, including UN Women, the World Bank, and the
International Monetary Fund, have now joined this research effort. This growing body of research
has elucidated the critical role of the gender division of unpaid and paid labor in understanding
how the macroeconomy functions. The result has been the emergence of the new subfield of gen-
der and macroeconomics that identifies the two-way causality between gender relations (and dis-
parities) and macroeconomic outcomes. Here we focus our assessment of this literature on
reviewing the literature on gendered macro models (and, where relevant, empirical tests of these
models) as a means to situate the theoretical framework of the empirical results discussed later in
this article.
Three distinct theoretical approaches to modeling the macroeconomic impact of gender dispar-
ities have emerged—neoclassical, heterodox/feminist models that focus on labor markets, and het-
erodox models that also incorporate considerations related to social reproduction and the gender
division of labor. Beginning with neoclassical models, earlier approaches to understanding the
impact of gender (in)equality on growth typically relied on Solow-type growth models. This the-
oretical framework exclusively examines the supply factors that affect growth, under the assump-
tion of perfectly competitive markets and full employment, with no role for aggregate demand.
The main gender variable in earlier models was gender differences in educational attainment.
1
For references to this work, see the following literature reviews: Kabeer and Natali (2013) and Seguino (2020).
INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF POLITICAL ECONOMY 145
The hypothesis advanced in these models is that gender discrimination in access to education
results in a selection bias problem (and therefore economic inefficiency). That is, the problem
was seen as overinvestment in the education of less qualified men and underinvestment in quali-
fied women, depressing economy-wide productivity and, as a result, slowing growth (Knowles,
Lorgelly, and Owen 2002).
In that literature, greater educational equality was also hypothesized to indirectly affect growth
by reducing fertility rates, as the opportunity cost of children rises with greater female education
(Galor and Weil 1996; Kim, Lee, and Shin 2016). Lower fertility rates improve the quality of
labor, it was hypothesized, given that more resources are invested in the reduced quantity of chil-
dren, thereby raising economy-wide productivity.
Empirical tests of these models suggested that gender equality in education was a stimulus to
growth. There are several limitations of these models, however. An implicit assumption of the
models was that gender equality in education would lead to a narrowing of the gender wage gap.
Absence of mechanisms to ensure women benefited from relative gains in education compared to
men, however, can lead simply to greater exploitation of women’s paid labor since they are not
able to capture the benefits of their higher relative productivity. Empirical evidence suggests that,
in fact, in some of the most rapidly growing economies with significant increases in female labor-
force participation, gender wage gaps have not narrowed and have in some cases widened (Berik,
Rodgers, and Zveglich 2004; Menon and Rodgers 2009).
More recently, neoclassical economists have also explored the macro-level benefits of women’s
increased labor-force participation (Klasen and Lamanna 2009; Cuberes and Teignier 2016). The
underlying selection bias argument is that the inefficient use of women’s talent (resulting from
their disproportionate exclusion from paid work and entrepreneurial positions) has a negative
effect on productivity and thus long-run growth. This set of models, however, does not con-
sider—or at least formally model—the trade-offs of women entering paid labor in terms of the
effect on social reproduction. Why is this important? There is an opportunity cost of women’s
increased employment in terms of reductions in the provision of caring labor. Although women’s
paid labor could potentially generate income to purchase care services for their children and fam-
ily, women are often sequestered into the lowest paying jobs where wages are too low to replace
their care labor. Also, in countries that lack a robust care system with adequate availability of
care services, the result of women’s increased paid work could be less time spent on care of
adults, the sick, and the elderly as well as children, decreasing the current well-being and, poten-
tially, long-run productivity growth. Thus, absent the right conditions, women’s increased labor-
force participation could slow rather than enhance long-run growth via a negative impact on the
provision of caring labor.
Another neoclassical approach modeling the effect of women’s paid employment is overlapping
generations (OLG) models, where women’s time allocation between home production, child rear-
ing, and market work is influenced by access to infrastructure (Agenor and Canuto 2015). The
models posit that better infrastructure (clean water, roads, electricity) reduces women’s time spent
on unpaid labor (men only do market work), thereby freeing up time to spend in remunerative
economic activities. In these models, children’s human capital accumulation depends on mothers’
human capital, while their health status depends on their mother’s health and her time allocated
to care. This is a partial remediation of previous neoclassical models, which do not account for
the role of social reproduction and gender in contributing to economy-wide well-being.
However, all classes of neoclassical models miss important macrolevel dynamics of gender rela-
tions. First, neoclassical models fail to account for the fact that adequate aggregate demand is
required to ensure that increased female labor-force participation is matched by sufficient labor
demand. Second, increased employment may not reflect an improvement in well-being if women
continue to carry the full load of unpaid labor, and if the conditions of work and remuneration
are poor. Third, the models do not explicitly model the complexity of social reproduction,
including the role of the state, in creating and supporting institutions of care. And finally, most
assume a one-size-fits-all macroeconomy, yet, as discussed in the following, the relationship
between microlevel gender relations and the macroeconomy depends in part on the structure of
production and the gender division of labor.
The architecture of heterodox feminist macroeconomics is better suited to accounting for
demand-side factors that influence gendered employment and wages. These models are built on
the theoretical framework offered by Kaleckian macroeconomics,2 which explores the impact of
redistribution on macrolevel outcomes. In those models, the class-based distributional variable is
the wage (or profit) share of income. Feminist economists have adapted this framework to
account for gender differences in income and employment, using gender wage gaps and gender
job segregation as their distributional variables to account for gender inequality. Those gender
differences are then integrated into structuralist macro models that reflect the stylized structural
features of economies (Taylor 2004). The resulting models control for the key features of econo-
mies: economic structure (agricultural, semi-industrialized, postindustrial), macrolevel policies
that influence relations with the rest of the world (rules governing trade and cross-border invest-
ment and finance), market structure (oligopolistic vs. competitive firms), trade and resulting price
elasticities, and balance of payments constraints. These models are both short- and long-run (as
compared to neoclassical models, which only evaluate the long run). Short-run models reflect
both the Keynesian and Kaleckian theoretical premises that markets are not perfectly competitive
and, as a result, that there can be excess capacity and thus less than full employment—all indica-
tive of insufficient aggregate demand.
Along these lines, Blecker and Seguino (2002) developed a model of a two-sector economy,
representing conditions in many semi-industrialized economies (SIEs) where women, to the
extent that they gain access to paid work, are segregated in the labor-intensive manufacturing
export sector while men are in nontradables and the capital-intensive export sector. Markets are
oligopolistic with firms adopting markup pricing. Seguino (2010) extends the two-sector model
approach to consider the role of gender inequality in low-income agricultural economies (LIAEs)
as compared to SIEs. She incorporates both rapidly acting gender variables in the short-run
model (wages and employment) and capabilities measures that have effects only in the longer
run. In LIAEs, it is men who are concentrated in the export sector while women work as subsist-
ence farmers. The implications of those models are that gender inequality is a stimulus to growth
in SIEs but the opposite holds in LIAEs. While these models enhanced our understanding of the
macroeconomic role that changes in the gender distribution of jobs and the gender wage gap
have on economic growth, they are incomplete because they did not address issues of care and
social reproduction.
More recently, the scope of gendered heterodox macroeconomic growth models has expanded
further to explore other avenues by which gender equality can be achieved. An example of this
work is Onaran, Oyvat, and Fotopoulou (2016), who model the impact of targeted public expen-
ditures that can reduce women’s care burden, facilitating their entry into the paid labor market.
In the global South, physical infrastructure investments in clean water, electrification, and roads,
for example, can reduce women’s unpaid labor time. Public investment in the social sector of the
economy that includes education, health, and social care can both reduce women’s unpaid care
burden by publicly funding such work and promote gender equality in employment, since women
workers tend to be concentrated in social services and publicly funded care work. In addition to
stimulating aggregate demand, this social infrastructure spending increases labor productivity,
2
Michał Kalecki (1971), a contemporary of Keynes, developed a model that investigates how the income distribution affects
output, employment, and growth in demand-constrained economies. The academic literature using this theoretical approach
has expanded over the last two decades into a rich literature that addresses dynamics in open as compared to closed
economies, and has taken into consideration the role of economic structure.
thereby promoting private investment and long-run growth. This research, however, did not for-
mally model gendered social reproduction.
Braunstein (2000) addressed this lacuna, developing a Kaleckian-type model to analyze how
gender roles in the household affect foreign direct investment in a developing country context.
She found that the extent to which women and men share the costs of social reproduction at the
household level determines women’s labor supply and the profitability of investment. The goal of
that paper was to understand the constraints imposed by international capital mobility on the
prospects for increased gender equality and women’s well-being, and living standards. But in add-
ition to that, the paper demonstrated pathways by which gendered household relations have mac-
rolevel effects and are in turn affected by macrolevel policies in a detailed and realistic way, as
compared to theoretical models that do not take into account economic structure.
More recent heterodox models have followed that lead, incorporating an explicit macroeco-
nomic role for social reproduction, illuminating an area of growth theory that had heretofore
been invisible—that is, the gendered process of the reproduction of people. Braunstein, van
Staveren, and Tavani (2011) developed a growth model along these lines, accounting for the time
and resources required to reproduce people and thus the future labor force as key ingredients of
a well-functioning economy. The model details how social reproduction is organized–—that is,
the extent to which reproduction takes place in the household, public, or market sectors—and the
gender distribution of the labor in each sector, which influences current aggregate demand and
long-run productivity growth. Thus, the model highlights the endogeneity of both paid and
unpaid labor and their feedback effects on the economy, taking account of demand as well as
structural features of economies.
To date, this model has not been empirically tested, and thus this article attempts to fill that
void. Our goal in the econometric analysis is to test the impact of these varying approaches to
organizing social reproduction, or care regimes, on the rate of economic growth, controlling for
the structure of the macroeconomy to influence outcomes. The econometric model (and underly-
ing macro model) is also novel because, unlike many of the earlier empirical analyses of the effect
of gender equality on growth, we account for demand-side factors that influence growth and
account for economic structure, given the importance of economic structure both in influencing
growth and in mediating between growth and gender.
Estimating Social Reproduction Regimes

In this section, we develop an empirical measure for how societies organize care provisioning,
and how these structures relate to those for growth and development. Based on principal compo-
nent analysis (PCA), these cross-section, time-series estimates will be used in the growth regres-
sion analysis that follows in the fourth section. We begin by presenting a conceptual model that
guides data selection for the PCA.
Modeling Growth and Social Reproduction

Braunstein, van Staveren, and Tavani (2011) differentiated between societies that are organized to
provide more and/or better care and societies that invest less in care, with both the demand and
supply sides playing important roles in that differentiation. The demand side of the model deter-
mines the social and structural relations for growth and investment, which includes investments
in human capacities. Economies are characterized as “care-led” when greater gender equality in
the labor market, as reflected in higher wages for women, is expansionary. Care-led economies
are those where the expansionary impact of increased aggregate demand and investments in
human capacities outweighs the contractionary impact of higher wages on profits and consequent
investment by firms. The driving mechanism on care is what is termed “caring spirits”. Caring
spirits refer to the tendency, whether based on social norms and preferences or on social struc-
tures of accumulation, of using income to build up the quantity or quality of human capacities in
ways that raise long-term productivity. Care-led economies are characterized by stronger caring
spirits. Care-led growth is different from the structuralist notion of wage-led growth because cap-
ital accumulation is driven not just by purchases of physical capital or technology. Investment
also includes investments in labor, which in turn contributes to longer term growth. The key dif-
ference then is that workers’ incomes not only impact investment indirectly through their impact
on aggregate demand and profits, but also affect investment directly through the impact of higher
wages on labor’s productive capacities—social reproduction. Such investments in labor raise long-
term prospects for (human and physical) capital accumulation and growth. Getting back to the
question of gender: Because labor markets around the world are segregated by gender, and
research across a variety of countries shows that higher wages for women are associated with
more spending on nutrition, health, and education, care-led economies also tend to be those
where higher wages for women (as opposed to workers in general) increase growth partly because
of the impact of higher wages for women on the demand for care provisioning.3 Gender differen-
tials in investments in social reproduction are not necessary for an economy to be care-led, how-
ever. The key structural quality is that higher wages, particularly for women, are expansionary in
the sense that they raise demand and investments in labor by more than they squeeze profits and
investments by firms.
Macroeconomic structure and policy also affect the relationship between gender equality in the
labor market, and aggregate demand and growth. More development-oriented macroeconomic
management makes care-led demand and growth more likely, as does less reliance on global sour-
ces of aggregate demand or globally mobile sources of capital. The greater the exposure to global
markets, in terms of both the existing extent of international trade and capital flows and the pros-
pects for increasing that integration, the less likely it is that care-led growth will prevail.
The alternative to care-led demand and growth is termed “inequality-led” and refers to cir-
cumstances where higher wages for women are contractionary and negatively associated with
investment demand and growth. The connection between (women) workers’ earnings and invest-
ments in labor in inequality-led regimes is weak, so the contractionary impact of higher wages on
profits and investment demand is more likely to outweigh the expansionary impact on consump-
tion and social reproduction. Inequality-led economies may reflect circumstances where long-
term investments in human capacities are challenged by the press of hypercompetitive global
markets, as in economies dependent on external demand or with government policy focused on
merely facilitating more open markets for global trade and investment. Social norms and values
that devalue spending for the care of others and produce weak caring spirits are also more likely
to be inequality-led.
In contrast to the demand side’s focus on the drivers of investment and growth, the supply
side of the model reflects the distribution of the time and money costs of social reproduction
among women, men, the state, and capital. The key question it answers is what happens to
human capacities production when women increase their paid labor-force participation. Like the
demand side, there are two stylized cases: high road and low road. The high-road case exhibits
more gender-egalitarian systems for paid and unpaid caregiving, as manifested by a more gender-
equal division of labor in the household, a high substitutability between market and nonmarket
care provisioning, and strong public supports for care. When women increase their paid labor-
force participation, high-road economies more effectively substitute for the consequent loss of
women’s unpaid care time in the production of human capacities. In low-road economies, where
women provide the majority of either the time or money resources needed for social
3
For recent work on gender segregation internationally, see Borrowman and Klasen (2020). For a review of the efficiency
argument for gender equality, including the literature on women’s spending on household needs, see Braunstein (2011).
Table 1. Care regimes.

Supply: distribution of social reproduction
Demand: growth Low road High road
Care-led Time squeeze Mutual
Higher wages for women stimulate growth on Higher wages for women stimulate growth on
the demand side, but squeezes care time on the demand side, and increase human capacities
the supply side and lowers human capacities production on the supply side. Growth and social
production. Growth is elusive or unstable. reproduction reinforce one another.
Inequality-led Exploitation Wage squeeze
Higher wages for women lower growth on Higher wages for women lower growth on the
the demand side, and squeeze time on the demand side, but they enhance human capacities
supply side and lower human capacities production on the supply side. Growth is elusive
production. Growth is partly based on or unstable.
exploiting women’s labor.
Note. This table is based on Table 3 in Braunstein, Bouhia, and Seguino (2019).
reproduction, higher female labor-force participation is accompanied by declines in human

capacities production.
Table 1 illustrates the four stylized social reproduction regimes that result when the supply
and demand sides are combined. Starting with care-led demand, where higher wages for women
positively impact investment and growth, when a low-road distribution of social reproduction
characterizes the supply side, the increased labor-force participation that is spurred by higher
wages for women squeezes the time available for care provisioning and lowers human capacities
production. In this “time squeeze” regime, the positive impact that gender equality has on
demand and growth is contradicted by the negative supply-side impact on human capacities pro-
duction, and growth becomes unstable or elusive as a result. By contrast, if care-led demand and
growth is paired with the more gender-egalitarian high-road distribution of social reproduction,
where the loss in women’s care time is compensated by increased sharing of care with men, cap-
ital, or the state, greater gender equality in the labor market is consistent with both higher growth
and more human capacities production—the “mutual” regime.
Take now the case of inequality-led demand, where higher wages for women depress invest-
ment demand and consequently growth. When paired with a high-road supply side, termed “wage
squeeze,” the positive impact that higher wages and female labor-force participation has on
human capacities production is undermined by the negative impact these have on investment and
growth. Like the contradictions (though in opposite directions) of the time squeeze case, these
opposing forces are likely to render growth low or inconsistent. When inequality-led demand is
paired with a low-road approach to social reproduction, the “exploitation” regime, relations on
the demand and supply sides reinforce one another because gender inequality in the labor market
raises profitability (and growth) without compromising the social relations of human capacities
production. To the extent that investment and growth do occur, however, they are based on
exploiting women’s labor and depleting human resources. In these senses, exploitation regimes
are a sort of trap, in that efforts to improve gender equality in terms of either the labor market
or care provisioning will lead to lower rates of growth and development.4
Empirical Approach
This section uses principal component analysis (PCA) to estimate the social reproduction regimes
of Table 1 for a set of 121 developed and developing countries over three time periods,
1991–2001, 2002–2007, and 2008–2015, a separation that maximizes coverage (variables are
4
For a more extensive discussion of these regimes in terms that are embedded in particular country cases, see
Braunstein (2015).
Table 2. Summary statistics for demand and supply.

Variable Short name Mean Median SD
Demand
Caring spirits Difference in 5-year pp changes in education and edHDI 0.03 0.02 0.09
income indices
Difference in 5-year pp changes in health and healthHDI 0.01 0.01 0.07
income indices
Global orientation Manufacturing exports as a share of GDP (%) mfgX 13.71 7.04 18.77
Inward FDI as a share of gross fixed capital FDI 19.11 13.71 21.10
formation (%)
Macro policy Public investment as a share of GDP (%) pub 5.81 4.78 3.83
Weighted average tariff rates applied TFF 8.74 8.09 5.12
Supply
Men’s relative Ratio of women’s age of first marriage to men’s afmr 0.87 0.88 0.06
contribution to age of first marriage
social reproduction
Gender wage gap Ratio of the share of wage and salaried workers fmemp 0.93 1.03 0.26
in women’s employment to
men’s employment
Public provisioning Public social protection and health expenditure as sph 9.69 6.04 7.95
of care a share of GDP (%)
Reproductive Average access to electricity, nonsolid fuel, repro 70.31 84.53 29.06
infrastructure improved sanitation facilities, and improved
water source
Extent and quality of Share of women’s service employment to total mcare 9.36 2.77 14.18
the market employment, raised to the power of the
care sector inverse of the Palma ratio
Note. These are average values for entire period, 1991–2015. SD, standard deviation; pp, percentage point.
averaged over each time period) and reflects global economic cycles. It follows the methodology
presented in Braunstein, Bouhia, and Seguino (2019), but with different underlying data. The set
of countries is determined by those included in the regression analysis. The approach involves
first selecting relevant variables and then using PCA to generate two summary principal compo-
nent scores, one for the demand side that reflects the relations of investment and growth, and a
second for the supply side that captures those of the distribution of social reproduction. The
scores are then used in the growth regressions presented in the next section. Our focus on devel-
oping countries guides choices on the underlying data, in terms of both using data with sufficient
coverage, and implementing a statistical strategy for estimating missing values.
Table 2 details the elements of the model measured, the data used to measure them, and sum-
mary statistics for the demand and supply sides; a data appendix gives data sources. Starting with
the demand side in the top rows of Table 2, caring spirits are measured by first disaggregating
the indices for education, health, and income that underlie the Human Development Index
(HDI), and then calculating the difference between the 5-year percentage point change in educa-
tion and income and the same change in the health index relative to income.5 The results reflect
achievements in education or health relative to achievements in income. Given a particular
increase in income, we expect countries with stronger caring spirits to have a larger improvement
in education or health than countries with weaker caring spirits. That is, stronger caring spirits
will induce societies to spend a greater proportion of income gains on investments in human
capacities, with concomitantly higher values in this variable as a result. And though the room for
such achievements narrows as countries move up the income ladder, it is health and education
performance relative to that of income that is emphasized, so even small absolute changes can
give larger relative ones. The stronger the caring spirits, and the greater the value of this variable,
the more likely the demand side is care-led.
5
The HDI’s education index is based on mean years of schooling for adults older than 25 years and expected years of
schooling for children entering school: health by life expectancy at birth (UNDP 2013).
Manufacturing exports as a share of gross domestic product (GDP) and inward foreign direct
investment (FDI) are a proxy for the extent of global orientation. While exporting manufactures
and attracting FDI are two potentially important vectors for accessing the development benefits
of globalization, increased dependence on highly competitive export markets and more globally
mobile capital may constrain domestic wage growth or the ability of governments to tax capital,
limiting investments in human capacities. Given the hypotheses of the model, we would expect
these variables to be positively associated with inequality-led growth.
Macroeconomic policy variables were chosen to reflect the extent to which governments use
public policy to promote and guide development, and are proxied by public investment as a share
of GDP and the weighted average tariff rate applied. Public investment reflects the importance of
government spending on physical infrastructure in national production, with governments that
take a more active role in driving development likely to have larger shares. Similarly, the tariff
variable reflects the willingness of governments to actively manage global integration through
trade policy. The model predicts that both factors will be positively associated with care-led
growth. Other macroeconomic policy variables were also explored, particularly those that reflect
monetary policy stances. However, these do not track with the other variables in a way that is
straightforward to interpret. Measures for financialization offer a partial exception, a point we
return to in the fourth section.
Turning now to the determinants of the supply side PCA in the bottom rows of Table 2, for
all of them larger values are positively associated with the likelihood of a high road or more gen-
der-egalitarian distribution of social reproduction. Starting with the first row, men’s relative con-
tribution to social reproduction is proxied by the ratio of women’s to men’s age at first marriage.
Absent sufficient panel data on gender differences in time use, this ratio reasonably tracks avail-
able country-level data on gender differences in time spent on unpaid domestic work.6 Women’s
mean age of first marriage is lower than men’s in all countries surveyed, and the larger the gap,
the greater is the potential power differential between husband and wife, a differential that is
associated with less participation by men in the traditionally feminine sphere of unpaid domes-
tic work.
Gender wage gaps are proxied by the share of wage and salaried workers in women’s total
employment relative to men’s, with the ratio reflecting women’s relative access to higher quality
and paid work. One way to understand this is by considering the jobs that are excluded from this
category: self-employment, contributing (i.e., unpaid) family workers, and employers. In develop-
ing country contexts, self-employment and unpaid family work are likely markers of residual
unemployment, so women’s relative access to wage and salaried employment is an aggregate indi-
cator of women’s access to better jobs. The relationship between this measure and the gender dis-
tribution of social reproduction is twofold. First, as women increase their labor-force
participation and seek either substitutes for unpaid care or complements that increase the prod-
uctivity of that care (e.g., refrigerators or washing machines), the higher paying the employment,
the more likely it is that such efforts will be successful. Second, higher wages and better working
conditions for women are associated with those for paid workers more generally, and better
employment conditions for paid care workers are also likely to result in better care.
Public provisioning for care is captured by public spending on social protection and health as a
share of GDP. These expenditures include those for unemployment, employment injury, disabil-
ity, maternity, and general social assistance, as well as health. Reproductive infrastructure is
proxied by average population access to electricity, nonsolid fuel, and improved sanitation facili-
ties and water sources, and they measure investments in the physical infrastructure necessary to
6
With observations from more than 80 countries from the United Nations Statistical Division, the correlation coefficient
between the two is 0.52.
Table 3. PCA detail.

Demand 1990–2001 2002–2007 2008–2015 Supply 1990–2001 2002–2007 2008–2015
Coordinates of the variables on the first component of the PCA by time period
edHDI 0.79 0.66 0.67 afmr 0.81 0.82 0.86
healthHDI 0.62 0.53 0.53 fmemp 0.86 0.84 0.88
mfgX 0.60 0.69 0.67 sph 0.86 0.85 0.83
FDI 0.38 0.50 0.35 repro 0.91 0.91 0.90
pub 0.69 0.59 0.64 mcare 0.68 0.73 0.76
TFF 0.68 0.71 0.82
Percentage of variance captured by the first component by time period
40.91 37.90 39.63 68.37 69.04 71.88
carry out social reproduction. Both measures are positively associated with social supports for
care work.
The extent and quality of the market care sector reflects the availability of high-quality
market alternatives to traditional forms of care provisioning, and are positively associated with a
high-road approach to social reproduction. Both paid and unpaid care work are seen as largely
women’s work throughout the world, and, particularly with the decline in industrial sector
employment overall, women’s increasing labor-force participation over the past couple of decades
has to an important extent been concentrated in the sorts of jobs—many of them informal—trad-
itionally associated with women’s unpaid domestic work (Razavi and Staab 2010). To measure
the “extent” of the market sector, then, we take women’s service-sector employment as a share of
total employment, and then discount it for “quality” by using the inverse of a measure of income
inequality, the Palma ratio, as an exponent. The latter is the ratio of the share of income going to
the richest 10% of the population divided by the share going to the poorest 40% (Palma 2014). It
emphasizes how much inequality is concentrated in the longer tails of the income distribution.
The more of this type of inequality, we maintain, the lower are the quality and pay of the market
care sector.
Results
Using the variables specified in Table 2, we now turn to implementing PCA to generate demand-
and supply-side scores for the panel growth analysis to follow. The first principal component of
the PCA combines the variables in Table 2 to produce two representative scores that are a
weighted combination of the original variables.7 Table 3 lists the resulting coordinates by variable
and time period.
Starting with the left-hand set of columns in Table 3 for the demand side, variables that meas-
ure the elements associated with care-led growth are positive and increase the demand score,
while those associated with inequality-led growth decrease it. The one exception is global orienta-
tion and macro policy in the first time period (1990–2001), when greater global orientation and
lower levels of public investment and tariff coverage are positively associated with the demand
score. We explore this inconsistency in the following by anchoring the weights on the 2008–2015
time period, as well as by evaluating an alternative PCA that emphasizes macro policy and struc-
ture by adding measures for financialization. In the right-hand set of columns that present results
for the supply side, all of the variables contribute positively to the PCA score, in line with the
model’s prediction that these factors are associated with a more gender-egalitarian or high-road
distribution of social reproduction. As noted in the bottom row of Table 3, the percentage of the
variance accounted for by the first component, the one used for the regression analysis, is about
40% on the demand side and 70% on the supply side. The greater explanatory power of the
7
For more detail on this approach, including methods to deal with missing values, see Braunstein, Bouhia, and Seguino (2020).
Table 4. Distribution of social reproduction regimes by region, 2008–2015.

Region Exploitation (%) Mutual (%) Time squeeze (%) Wage squeeze (%) Number of countries
Developed economies 21 24 32 24 33
Developing Africa 3 9 85 3 34
Developing America 19 29 19 33 21
Developing Asia 23 15 19 42 26
Transition economies 14 14 0 71 7
World 16 18 40 26 121
Note. Countries are grouped by United Nations classification.
supply side suggests that these estimates are more robust than those on the demand side, a point
we return to in the following.
Table 4 summarizes regime classification counts by developing region for the latest time
period. Developing regions, where a greater share of countries has more outward-oriented econo-
mies, such as Asia and Latin America, are also more likely to have inequality-led growth on the
demand side, with consequent social reproduction regimes characterized by either exploitation or
wage squeeze. Conversely, regions with more domestically oriented economies and care-led
demand and growth paired with a low-road, gender-inegalitarian distribution of social reproduc-
tion have a higher incidence of countries in the time squeeze regime. This is the case for most of
the developing Africa region, as well as for many developed countries that take a more liberal
approach to social welfare provisioning, such as the United States. Moving beyond these categori-
zations, the key contribution of this article is to evaluate how different systems for organizing
social reproduction complement or constrain growth and development, the focus of the
next section.
Social Reproduction and Growth

In this section we take the PCA estimates of social reproduction regimes discussed in the preced-
ing and use them as independent variables in an econometric analysis of economic growth.
Empirical Approach and Data

The baseline empirical model is given by Equation (1), which specifies that average annual
growth in real per-capita GDP in country i over time t, g it , is a function of (1) a convergence
effect—capturing the tendency of wealthier economies to grow more slowly than poorer ones
because of both decreasing returns to capital and the lower costs of replication versus discovery—
measured by the log of real per-capita GDP at the beginning of the time period, lnGDPit0 ; (2)
physical investment, measured by average business investment as a share of GDP over the time
period, INV=GDP it ; and (3) the stock of human capital, measured as average years of secondary
schooling in the total population aged 15 years and older at the beginning of the time period,
Hit0 : The convergence effect is expected to be negative (that is, wealthier countries are hypothe-
sized to grow more slowly, all else equal), and the associations between physical and human cap-
ital and growth are expected to be positive. We include a measure of institutional quality, the
rule of law, to control for the well-documented role of political institutions in determining eco-
nomic performance (Acemoglu and Robinson 2008). Regional (Ri) and time (Tt) fixed effects are
also included in all regressions. As the reader will note, this specification is similar to that used
in Solow-type growth decomposition analyses. Data notes and sources are in the data appendix,
while summary statistics are provided in Table 5.
g it ¼ a þ b1 lnGDPit0 þ b2 INV=GDP it þ b3 Hit0 þ b4 lawit þ b5 Ri þ b6 Tt þ it (1)
Table 5. Summary statistics for regression data.

Variable Mean Std. dev. Minimum Maximum
Per-capita GDP growth (percent) 2.23 2.62 8.25 13.53
Standard deviation of per-capita GDP growth (percent) 3.21 3.56 0.35 36.85
Per-capita GDP ($2011 PPP) 13,787 15,462 520 103,645
INV/GDP (percent) 21.87 5.59 4.52 44.34
Secondary schooling (years) 2.73 1.50 0.10 6.71
Rule of law 0.003 1.00 2.15 1.99
Demand score 0.06 1.52 5.96 5.64
Supply score 0.23 1.84 4.28 4.71
Exploitation 0.28 0.96 0.00 7.29
Mutual 0.40 1.38 0.00 12.81
Time squeeze 0.62 1.68 0.00 10.45
Wage squeeze 0.74 1.63 0.00 10.23
Note. These statistics average the three time periods used in the panels of Table 6, and include only those observations used
in the regressions.
We modify the basic model by incorporating social reproduction into Equation (1), using one
of two approaches. The first adds the supply and demand scores to the baseline equation to
explore whether and how care- versus inequality-led demand on the one hand, and low- versus
high-road distributions of social reproduction on the other, are directly correlated with growth.
To assist with interpretation and grouping developed and developing countries together for the
regressions, we standardized the demand (supply) scores to have a mean of zero, with positive
values indicating care-led (high road) and negative values indicating inequality-led (low road).
The interpretation of the regressions will differ for the demand and supply scores. On the
demand side, a positive coefficient estimate would indicate that being care-led is associated with
higher growth, suggesting that (average) prevailing structures of growth and accumulation have
indeed been care-led. The opposite result, a negative coefficient estimate, indicates instead that
the drivers of inequality-led growth—the macro policy choices, wage compression, and lack of
investment in human capacities—have been dominant in structuring growth dynamics. From
Table 5, demand scores have ranged between 6.0 and 5.6, with a mean close to zero of 0.06.8
The supply-side scores represent the distribution of social reproduction rather than relations
between the distribution of income (and hence investment) and growth. Given the strong and
positive empirical association between health, education, and labor-force participation-based
measures of gender equality and economic growth widely documented in the gender and growth
literature, we hypothesize a similarly positive association between the gender distribution of social
reproduction and growth.
The second approach to accounting for social reproduction first generates four dummy varia-
bles that indicate whether an observation (for a particular country and time period) can be char-
acterized as either exploitation (EXP), mutual (MUT), time squeeze (TSQ), or wage squeeze
(WSQ) based on the combination of the supply and demand PCA scores. These dummy variables
are then “weighted” by the strength of the regime, with weights calculated as the absolute value
of the product of the demand and supply scores as represented by Equation (2), where Wit repre-
sents the weight applied.
Wit ¼ jSupplyit Demandit j (2)
This weighting scheme helps account for the fact that the determination of the PCA axis is
relative and somewhat arbitrary (i.e., the numerical value at which a regime passes from one cat-
egory to another), as well as sensitive to missing values. Thus, the farther removed a country is
8
This mean does not exactly equal zero because not all observations used in the score standardization were used in the
regressions, and Table 6 includes only those observations included in the regressions.
Table 6. Regression results for growth and volatility of growth, 1990–2015.

Average annual per-capita GDP growth
Standard deviation of growth Long period growth
(1) (2) (3) (4) (5)
lnGDP 0.902 1.161 1.185 0.507 1.080
(0.210) (0.236) (0.230) (0.361) (0.250)
INV/GDP 0.168 0.170 0.157 0.141 0.124
(0.0306) (0.0303) (0.0321) (0.0476) (0.0425)
Secondary schooling 0.00552 0.0512 0.0288 0.340 0.0951
(0.173) (0.176) (0.174) (0.218) (0.153)
Law 0.582 0.501 0.721 1.933 0.591
(0.268) (0.266) (0.275) (0.516) (0.270)
Demand score 0.0851
(0.0763)
Supply score 0.370
(0.186)
Wage squeeze 0.0589 0.414 0.0874
(0.0828) (0.142) (0.0854)
Time squeeze 0.269 0.0374 0.557
(0.104) (0.202) (0.186)
Mutual 0.132 0.124 0.704
(0.0792) (0.117) (0.869)
Exploitation 0.270 0.471 0.614
(0.123) (0.333) (0.318)
Countries 121 121 121 121 121
Observations 363 363 363 363 121
R-squared 0.320 0.331 0.340 0.251 0.413
Notes. Robust standard errors in parentheses. p < 0.01, p < 0.05, p < 0.10. Details on variable definitions and sources
given in data Appendix B. All variables are contemporaneous averages except for lnGDP and secondary schooling, which are
taken at the beginning of the time period. All regressions are pooled OLS with time and region fixed effects; columns
(1)–(4) include three time periods, 1990–2015, 2002–2007, and 2008–2015, and column (5) is one period, 1990–2015.
from the PCA axis, the more confident we are in its classification, and hence that observation is
more heavily weighted in the analysis. The final specification for this approach is detailed in
Equation (3).
g it ¼ a þ b1 lnGDPit0 þ b2 INV=GDP it þ b3 Hit0 þ b4 lawit þ b5 EXPit Wit
(3)
þ b6 MUT it Wit þ b7 TSQit Wit þ b8 WSQit Wit þ b9 Ri þ b10 Tt þ it
Results
Columns (1)–(3) of Table 6 present the regression results for per-capita GDP growth in a stepwise
fashion, with column (4) shifting the analysis to the standard deviation of growth to consider vola-
tility in place of per-capita GDP growth. GDP volatility is of concern because it reduces economic
well-being and can compromise long-term growth prospects. In columns (1)–(4), pooled ordinary
least squares (OLS) estimates combine three time periods (the same as those used for the PCA,
1990–2001, 2002–2007, and 2008–2015) for a sample of 121 countries, with time fixed effects.
Column (5) presents results for treating the three time spans as one long period, 1990–2015. All
regressions include regional fixed effects that correspond to the groups in Table 4.9
Focusing first on the growth regressions in columns (1)–(3), the first two columns present the
baseline model of growth, which includes the log of initial real per-capita GDP, average physical
9
Some additional econometric details: Country fixed effects are typically the default in panel analyses, but we use pooled OLS
both because the long time period specification cannot accommodate country fixed effects, and because the variation we are
interested in is differences across countries, not within countries over time. This is in line with the fact that there is little
variation in the key variables of interest within countries over time, which includes just three time periods. On the question of
multicollinearity, independent variables are correlated, but this is not a problem for the coefficient estimates as evidenced by
examining variance inflation factors (VIFs), all of which average less than 5.
investment as a share of GDP, initial average years of secondary schooling, and the average value
for the rule of law over the period.10 Starting with column (1), the predicted coefficients on the
baseline model are highly significant and as expected, with exception of average per-capita years
of secondary schooling, which is not statistically significant. This result is in line with that of
other studies, and reflects the difficulty of measuring human capital stock for the purposes of
growth regression analysis (Benos and Zotou 2014); its presence or absence does not affect the
other coefficient estimates.
Adding the supply and demand PCA scores in column (2) does not appreciably affect the base-
line model coefficient estimates. Interestingly, the coefficient estimate on the demand PCA score is
negative in both specifications, though the standard errors are large and hence the estimate is not
statistically significant. Keeping this imprecision in mind but considering the meaning suggested by
the magnitude of the estimate, a one standard deviation shift away from inequality toward care-led
growth (an increase of 1.52 in the demand score) is associated with a 0.13 percentage point decline
in annual growth (which averaged 2.23%). A shift from the strongest care-led score (5.64) to the
strongest inequality-led score (5.96) is associated with a 1.0 percentage point increase in growth.
Recall that the PCA estimates for the first period, 1990–2001, exhibit some inconsistencies in the
relationship between the macro policy variables and the first component of the PCA (see Table 3).
If we drop this time period from the regression analysis, the demand score becomes larger and
highly statistically significant. The same result occurs if the PCA scores are anchored on the weights
for the 2008–2015 period, so this negative relationship is one that is emergent in the data and not
an artifact of the specification. These results are consistent with accounts that emphasize how neo-
liberal globalization and the increasing (and interrelated) incidence of inequality and financialization
across much of the world have transformed the structures of growth from one that mostly benefits
labor (or, in our nomenclature, carers) to one that largely benefits capital.11 Still, to understand the
net effects of care-led regimes on growth and development, they have to be paired with the distri-
bution of social reproduction on the supply side.
Turning now to the supply score, the coefficient estimate is large and statistically significant,
with a more gender-egalitarian distribution of social reproduction positively associated with eco-
nomic growth. To get a sense of economic importance, a one standard deviation (1.84) increase
in the supply score is associated with a 0.68 percentage point increase in per-capita growth.
Shifting from the highest gender-egalitarian score (4.71) to the strongest score for feminization of
responsibility and obligation (4.28) is associated with a loss in growth of 3.33 percentage points
in per-capita GDP growth. These results are in line with other studies that find evidence that gen-
der equality stimulates economic growth; here, however, we draw out the importance of consider-
ing the gender distribution of reproductive labor. Note also that the addition of the supply score
raises the magnitude of the convergence effect, suggesting that a more gender-egalitarian distribu-
tion of social reproduction may increase the rate of catch-up.
Column (3) presents results for the weighted social reproduction regime approach specified in
Equation (3). The only regime positively associated with growth is the mutual regime, where
care-led growth is paired with a gender-egalitarian distribution of social reproduction, and the
dynamics of supply and demand reinforce one another from a gender perspective.12 For every 1-
point increase in the weight associated with this regime, growth increases by 0.13 percentage
points. However, when care-led growth is paired with a low-road social reproduction regime, as
10
Human capital stock is highly correlated with social reproduction, but the presence or absence of secondary schooling in the
regressions does not affect other coefficient estimates.
11
In the parlance of the Marglin and Bhaduri model (1990) that gives the structural inspiration for this analysis, this is the
contrast between a stagnationist (care-led) regime and an exhilarationist (inequality-led) regime.
12
Running the regression with one weighted regime at a time gives the same results only with generally larger magnitudes
and greater statistical significance on the regime coefficient estimates. We present the simultaneous estimates approach
because it seems the most analytically straightforward.
in the time squeeze case, the association is strongly negative. A one standard deviation increase
in the time squeeze score is associated with a 0.45 percentage point decline in per-capita growth.
This contrast between the mutual and time squeeze cases gives a basis for better interpreting the
coefficient estimate on the demand score in column (2); in particular, the association between
care-led demand and growth depends on the distribution of social reproduction.
Turning now to inequality-led demand, in the exploitation case the gender dynamics of
demand and supply also complement one another, but growth is based on exploiting human
resources and women’s productive and reproductive labor. The coefficient estimate in column (3)
indicates that there are growth costs to this path: A 1-point increase in the intensity (or weight)
of the exploitation regime (close to its standard deviation of 0.96) is associated with a 0.27 per-
centage point decline in growth. The wage squeeze case, combining inequality-led demand with
high-road social reproduction, is slightly negative, though the magnitude is small and not statis-
tically significant.
Looking over the long period in column (5), where each country has one observation for the
entire 1990–2015 time period, largely confirms the weighted results. For care-led demand, the
negative association between time squeeze and growth contrasts the positive association for
mutual, though the magnitude of the coefficient estimate is large it is not statistically significant.
For inequality-led demand, as with multiple time periods, the wage squeeze coefficient13 is effect-
ively zero, but the exploitation coefficient is large and statistically significant.
Given the growth instabilities potentially associated with the contradictory aspects of the time
and wage squeeze cases, now we turn to evaluating growth volatility. Column (4) of Table 6
presents these results. The dependent variable is the standard deviation of annual per-capita
growth during the relevant time period—our measure of growth volatility. Interestingly, though
the wage squeeze regime is only weakly associated with growth as presented in columns (3) and
(5), it is strongly positive and significant—both statistically and economically—for growth volatil-
ity as illustrated in column (4). For every 1-point increase in the wage squeeze weight, the stand-
ard deviation increases by 0.41 percentage points. The other regimes fail to achieve statistical
significance, though the coefficient on the exploitation weight is large and negatively associated
with volatility. This result is consistent with the predictions of the model in the sense that the
gender dynamics of the supply and demand sides, though exploitative, run in the same direction.
However, while volatility is lower, so is growth.
Taken overall, the results presented in Table 6 largely confirm the hypothesized relations
among gender equality, social reproduction, and economic growth developed in the conceptual
model and estimated by PCA. Mutual regimes tend to be positively associated with growth, while
exploitative regimes detract from it. Economies characterized by a squeeze on unpaid care time
experience lower growth, and while those that constrain women’s wages in ways that support
growth may not experience an immediate sacrifice in terms of lost growth, there is evidence for
more growth volatility.
Incorporating Financialization into Macro Structure and Policy

Given the increasing importance of financialization in the global economy, we also conducted
analyses that included the Chinn–Ito index of capital account openness and the share of employ-
ment taken up by finance, insurance, and real estate (FIRE) in the demand score as additional
measures of macroeconomic structure and policy.14 Interestingly and perhaps not surprisingly, it
13
Some research suggests that while wage squeeze can stimulate growth in the short run, longer run growth is hampered
due to the negative effects on human capacities and productivity growth, although our data do not permit a long enough
time series to explore that effect.
14
There are additional variables one could consider to measure financialization—for instance, the utilization of credit by the
household sector to measure financialization. However, data availability limited our choices.
Table 7. A demand-side PCA with financialization.

1990–2001 2002–2007 2008–2015
Coordinates of the first principal component
mfgX 0.68 0.74 0.72
kaopen 0.83 0.80 0.82
fire_emp 0.86 0.87 0.87
pub 0.64 0.61 0.67
TFF 0.78 0.78 0.88
Percentage of variance captured by first component
58.25 58.31 63.59
was quickly apparent that caring spirits—reflected in achievements in education and health rela-
tive to income—did not have a consistent relationship with these extended macro measures, mak-
ing it difficult to interpret the resulting PCA estimates. The results of running the PCA for
demand without measures of caring spirits are listed in Table 7. These estimates are as the model
predicts, with greater financialization as measured by capital account openness (kaopen) and
FIRE as a share of total employment (fire_emp) positively associated with more globalization and
less active macroeconomic management. Note that contrary to the coordinates in Table 3, how-
ever, a more positive demand score now reflects inequality-led growth, which one needs to keep
in mind only when considering the demand score on its own, as opposed to the (weighted) social
reproduction regimes, which are based on absolute values.
It is instructive to pause on the point that our measures for financialization did not track con-
sistently with those for caring spirits, suggesting that the two macro policy choices/structural fea-
tures are independent from one another. Economies characterized by stronger caring spirits host
varying levels of financialization, as if the (gendered) structures, incentives, and norms for invest-
ment in human capacities are increasingly separate from those that are the traditional purviews
of monetary and fiscal policy. More likely, we hypothesize that it reflects macroeconomic policy
convergence across the world, where many of the big macroeconomic questions are considered
settled, largely along the lines of more neoliberal choices of greater liberalization, privatization,
and hyperglobalization—a point also emphasized by others (Braunstein 2012).
Table 8 lists the revised distribution of social reproduction regimes, which one can compare to
Table 4. The biggest change, consistent across all regions, is a much higher incidence of wage
squeeze regimes, which pairs inequality-led growth with a more gender-egalitarian distribution of
social reproduction, with nearly half of countries falling into this category in the latest time
period, as opposed to just about one-quarter when caring spirits are included as in Table 4.
The consequences for growth are listed in Table 9. These results are largely consistent with
those of Table 6, with the exception of the annual average annual per-capita growth costs of the
wage squeeze regime in column (2), which is now large and strongly significant. A one standard
deviation increase in this measure (2.67) is now associated with a 0.52 percentage point decline
in per-capita growth. The magnitudes for time squeeze and exploitation are still negative, statis-
tically significant, and slightly larger, and the coefficient for the mutual regime, just 15% of the
entire sample, is statistically zero. Growth volatility in column (3) is also broadly consistent with
earlier results, though the coefficient for wage squeeze is much smaller and statistically weaker. It
seems that the cost of its contradictions is now more distinctly manifest in lower growth rather
than in higher volatility.
Overall, then, financialization, in terms of both its importance in the economy (fire_emp) and
policy openness to it (kaopen), is connected to global orientation and macrodevelopmental man-
agement in ways that are systematic and consequential. This is true for countries that exhibit a
spectrum of norms and structures around investments in human capacities, that is, that vary in
caring spirits. However, how increasingly neoliberal or market-oriented structures of investment
and growth pair with the distribution of social reproduction is a development policy challenge
Table 8. Distribution of social reproduction regimes with financialization, 2008–2015.

Region Exploitation (%) Mutual (%) Time squeeze (%) Wage squeeze (%) Number of countries
Developed economies 18 9 33 39 33
Developing Africa 12 15 62 12 34
Developing America 5 14 0 81 21
Developing Asia 4 12 19 65 26
Transition economies 0 14 0 86 7
World 10 12 31 47 121
Table 9. Adding financialization, 1990–2015.

Average annual per-capita GDP growth
Standard deviation of growth
(1) (2) (3)
lnGDP 1.121 1.158 0.577
(0.253) (0.226) (0.303)
INV/GDP 0.165 0.150 0.134
(0.0304) (0.0301) (0.0471)
Secondary schooling 0.0171 0.0060 0.311
(0.177) (0.175) (0.229)
Law 0.591 0.874 1.894
(0.285) (0.273) (0.569)
Demand score 0.0835
(0.118)
Supply score 0.348
(0.189)
Wage squeeze 0.195 0.110
(0.0484) (0.0602)
Time squeeze 0.309 0.0422
(0.0937) (0.178)
Mutual 0.158 0.247
(0.120) (0.172)
Exploitation 0.341 0.0035
(0.0904) (0.102)
Countries 121 121 121
Observations 363 363 363
R-squared 0.330 0.350 0.231
Notes. Robust standard errors in parentheses. p < 0.01, p < 0.05, p < 0.10. All regressions are pooled OLS with time and
region fixed effects, and include three time periods, 1990–2015, 2002–2007, and 2008–2015. See Table 7 for add-
itional notes.
that is increasingly important to tackle. These results also suggest that social policies designed to
shore up the disinvestment or underinvestment in human capacities that may accompany the
expanding reach of liberalized markets will not be enough to deliver growth.
Concluding Discussion
In the last 25 years, feminist macroeconomists have identified pathways by which gender inequality
influences economic growth and development. That work focused primarily on transmission mech-
anisms via the labor market. More recent research, however, has expanded the scope to incorporate
the role of gender in social reproduction, which positively impacts economy-wide growth via the
effect on labor productivity. That theoretical work is buttressed by the analysis here, which incorpo-
rates social reproduction into an empirical growth model, allowing for differentiation of care
regimes along with varying demand conditions that influence aggregate outcomes.
Our econometric results allow us to examine the feminist macroeconomic hypothesis that gender
relations not only in labor markets but also in terms of care work have macro-level impacts. Our
results show that a more gender-equal distribution of social reproduction between women, men,
capital, and the state stimulates economic growth, as hypothesized in theoretical models. More
equitably sharing and spending on care, in other words, is not only a household decision, but one
that affects standards of living economy-wide, as well as economic growth. This underscores the
importance of governments integrating social reproduction considerations into their policy frame-
works—and again emphasizes that social expenditures are not merely discretionary but are in fact a
type of investment. Further, our results show that many countries are stuck in an organization of
production and reproduction that is contradictory and costly for growth. This is particularly true as
macroeconomic structures and policies converge toward the dictates of liberalization and hyperglob-
alization, and away from governments taking a more active role in guiding development. While
more research and better data can improve on this analysis, the results reported here both are a val-
idation of feminist economists’ identification of the role of care in promoting overall societal well-
being and suggest that further exploration of this topic is warranted.
The long-ignored role of social reproduction and its positive impact on growth is especially
important for policymaking in poor countries. Recent World Bank and International Monetary
Fund gender analyses have emphasized that increasing women’s labor-force participation is good
for growth, but fail to account for the impact on social reproduction. Their policy advice, which
is to stimulate women’s entry into paid labor, while at the same time placing less emphasis on
(and even discouraging) wage growth and expenditures on social infrastructure, is unlikely to
yield a positive impact on growth, according to the results of our analysis. Rather, a reorientation
of analyses of government spending and related wage policies suggests that the benefits of tar-
geted spending and policies that promote gender equality and social reproduction may in fact be
self-financing due to their positive effect on growth. In the context of economic crises, where
governments may turn to austerity measures in response to rising budget deficits, our results also
caution against such measures, especially insofar as they reduce spending on care. Recovery, our
results suggest, will be faster (and deficit spending ratified) by preserving expenditures that sup-
port human capacities development during economic hard times.
Acknowledgments
We thank the organizers, supporters, and participants of the Care Work and the Economy Project (CWE), an ini-
tiative of the Program on Gender Analysis in Economics (PGAE) at American University. Generous financial sup-
port for this work was provided through PGAE by The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. We benefited from
important feedback at the CWE Berlin workshop, the 2019 Allied Social Science Association meetings, the 2019
Eastern Economic Association meetings, and at seminars at American University and the University of
Massachusetts Boston, as well as the journal’s anonymous reviewers. All mistakes are ours.
Notes on contributors
Elissa Braunstein is a professor and chair of economics at Colorado State University and Editor of the journal
Feminist Economics. She also worked as a senior economist and head of the Unit on Economic Cooperation and
Integration Among Developing Countries at UNCTAD. Her research focuses on the international and macroeco-
nomic aspects of development, with particular emphasis on growth, macro policies, social reproduction, and gen-
der. She publishes widely in both academic and policy venues, and has done consulting work for a number of
international development institutions, including the ILO, the World Bank, UNDP, and UN Women.
Stephanie Seguino is a professor of economics at the University of Vermont, and a research associate at the
Political Economy Research Institute. Her research explores the relationship between intergroup inequality by class,
race, and gender on the one hand and economic growth and development on the other. Seguino also studies the
impact of globalization on income distribution and well-being, with a particular emphasis on Asian and Caribbean
economies. She has been an advisor or consultant to numerous international organizations, including the World
Bank, UNDP, ADB, and USAID, and publishes regularly in refereed journals, including World Development,
Journal of Development Studies, and Feminist Economics.
Levi Altringer is a PhD candidate in economics at Colorado State University. His research interests include stratifi-
cation economics, the political economy of race and gender, social reproduction, applied microeconomics, and
public economics. His dissertation work seeks to better understand the role of care in economic outcomes.
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Data Appendix
A. Data underlying the PCA.
Variable Short name Source

5-year percentage point change in HDI edHDI Calculated based on disaggregating components
education index less 5-year of the Human Development Index
percentage point change in (HDI), UNDP
income index
5-year percentage point change in HDI healthHDI Calculated based on disaggregating components
health index less 5-year percentage of the Human Development Index
point change in income index (HDI), UNDP
Manufacturing exports as a share mfgX Manufacturing exports drawn from Comtrade
of GDP database, GDP from World Development
Indicators (WDI) database, both in US$.
Inward FDI as a share of GDP FDI Calculated from WDI database.
Public investment as a share of GDP pub Calculated from WDI database, based on
reported shares of private investment in gross
fixed capital formation.
Weighted average tariff rates applied TFF Calculated based on data drawn from TRAINS
database, UNCTAD. Weights based on imports
by product group at the HS two-digit level.
Ratio of female age of first marriage to afmr Calculated based on UNDESA Population Division
male age of first marriage World Marriage Data.
Ratio of the share of wage and salaried fmemp Calculated based on data drawn from
workers in women’s to WDI database.
men’s employment
Public social protection and health sph Drawn from Table B.12 in the 2014/15 World
expenditure as a share of GDP Social Protection Report (ILO 2014). Public
social protection expenditures include public
benefits for the following: unemployment,
employment injury, disability, maternity, and
general social assistance.
Average access to electricity, nonsolid repro Calculated based on series drawn from
fuel, improved sanitation facilities, WDI database.
and improved water source
Share of women’s service employment mcare Employment share calculated based on data
to total employment, raised to the from WDI database; Palma ratio drawn from
power of the inverse of the Global Income and Consumption Project
Palma ratio (GICP) database.
Employment in the fire, insurance, and fire_emp ILO Statistics database.
real estate sector as share of
total employment.
Chinn–Ito Index of capital kaopen Chinn and Ito (2006), updated.
account openness
B. Data used in the regressions.
Variable Short name Source and notes

Per-capita GDP growth Per capita GDP growth Period averages calculated using annual growth
in real local currency units from WDI.
Per-capita GDP lnGDP Log of real per-capita GDP, using expenditure-
side real GDP at chained PPPs (2011 US$)
from Penn World Tables 9.0.
Investment as a share of GDP INV/GDP Gross fixed capital formation as a share of GDP,
from WDI.
Secondary schooling Secondary Schooling Average years of secondary schooling in the
total population aged 15 years and older
(Barro and Lee 2013)
Rule of law law Worldwide Governance Indicators published by
the World Bank, which aggregates data from
a number of different sources on sentiments
regarding the extent of legal safeguards,
including the likelihood of crime and violence.
Ranges between 2.5 and 2.5.
Region Region Regions include five groups based on the UN
classification: developed, transition,
developing Africa, developing America, and
developing Asia.
Demand score Demand score Generated by the PCA. Scores used for the long
period estimates were generated from a long-
period imputation and PCA.
Supply score Supply score Generated by the PCA. Scores used for the long
period estimates were generated from a long-
period imputation and PCA.
Weighted exploitation exploitation Dummy for exploitation weighted by magnitude
of the regime as specified by Equation (2).
Weighted mutual mutual Dummy for mutual weighted by magnitude of
the regime as specified by Equation (2).
Weighted time squeeze time squeeze Dummy for time squeeze weighted by
magnitude of the regime as specified by
Equation (2).
Weighted wage squeeze wage squeeze Dummy for wage squeeze weighted by
magnitude of the regime as specified by
Equation (2).

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International Journal of Political Economy

ISSN: (Print) (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/mijp20

Estimating the Role of Social Reproduction in

Elissa Braunstein, Stephanie Seguino & Levi Altringer

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Estimating the Role of Social Reproduction in

Macroeconomic Frameworks for Exploring the Role of Gender and Social

Estimating Social Reproduction Regimes

Modeling Growth and Social Reproduction

Table 1. Care regimes.

reproduction, higher female labor-force participation is accompanied by declines in human

Table 2. Summary statistics for demand and supply.

Table 3. PCA detail.

Table 4. Distribution of social reproduction regimes by region, 2008–2015.

Social Reproduction and Growth

Empirical Approach and Data

Table 5. Summary statistics for regression data.

Table 6. Regression results for growth and volatility of growth, 1990–2015.

Incorporating Financialization into Macro Structure and Policy

Table 7. A demand-side PCA with financialization.

Table 8. Distribution of social reproduction regimes with financialization, 2008–2015.

Table 9. Adding financialization, 1990–2015.

Variable Short name Source

B. Data used in the regressions.

Variable Short name Source and notes

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