Integrating the Social Reproduction of Labour Into Macroeconomic Theory: Unpaid Caregiving and Productivity in Paid Production

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to contribute to the integration of unpaid caregiving in the household into short- and long-term macroeconomic theory and, in particular, the theoretical structure of production on the supply-side of the economy. The ambition of the project is to furnish a general theoretical representation of how unpaid caregiving and its (gendered) social structure contributes to the technical conditions of production in the sphere of marketed output. In so doing, it aims to provide macro theorists with an apparatus that allows consistent description of both short-term (levels of activity) and long-term (rates of growth) macro outcomes in a manner that routinely integrates feminist insights regarding the gendered structure of the social reproduction of labour into macroeconomic analysis.