Thinking Citizen Blog — The “Shadow Economy,” the “Gray Market,” and “Devaluing Women’s Work”
Thinking Citizen Blog — Tuesday is Economics, Finance, and Business Day
Today’s Topic: The “Shadow Economy,” the “Gray Market,” and “Devaluing Women’s Work”
Yesterday, in the foreign policy day post on India, there was a chart which contrasted India’s low female labor force participation rate of 23% versus 61% in China and 56% in the US. But do those numbers give a distorted view? What about the “gray market”? What about the “shadow economy”? Is women’s work not being appropriately counted? and compensated? Today, a few notes an IMF blog as well as from the Wikipedia article on the “Informal Economy.” Experts — please chime in. Correct, elaborate, elucidate.
“THE ECONOMIC COST OF DEVALUING WOMEN’S WORK” — IMF (see first link below)
1. “As much as half of the world’s work is unpaid. And most of it is done by women… Examples of unpaid work include cooking, cleaning, fetching food or water, and caring for children and the elderly. These tasks are not counted as part of economic activity because they are difficult to measure based on values in the marketplace. Yet their economic value is substantial, with estimates ranging from 10 to 60 percent of GDP.”
2. “It’s no secret that women disproportionately shoulder the burden of unpaid work. Less well understood is just how many more unpaid hours women put in than men on a given day. Women do 4.4 hours of unpaid work on average around the world and men only 1.7 hours.”
3. “There are large differences across countries. In Norway, the gap is small, with women doing 3.7 hours of unpaid work, while men contribute 3. On the other extreme, in Egypt, women do 5.4 hours per day of unpaid work and men only 35 minutes. In the US, women do 3.8 hours of unpaid work and men do 2.4 hours.
THE ISSUE OF CHOICE AND THE SPLIT BETWEEN CHILD CARE VERSUS HOUSEHOLD CHORES, FETCHING WATER AND COLLECTING FIREWOOD
1. “Certainly, some unpaid work is done entirely by choice and the value to society of raising children for societies cannot be disputed. But more than 80 percent of unpaid work hours are devoted to domestic chores aside from child and elder care.”
2. “UNICEF estimates that women spend 200 million hours per day worldwide simply fetching water.”
3. “In India women spend more than an hour every day collecting firewood.”
NB: “Better access to electricity and water and less expensive appliances helped boost female labor force participation Mexico and Brazil. Expanding internet access to the entire population can help women take advantage of the gig economy and flexible work arrangements.”
THE SIZE OF THE SHADOW ECONOMY — are these numbers remotely accurate? who knows?
1. “In India, the country’s informal sector accounted for over 80 percent of the non-agricultural industry during the last 20 years.” (Wikipedia) Is this true? A stark contrast to the statistic in the table above from the Association of Chartered Certified Accountants. Let’s say that agriculture accounts for 50% of the Indian workforce. Is the informal economy in India really 40% not 14%? Who is to say?
2. What is the “informal economy”? “The part of the economy that is neither taxed nor monitored by any form of government.”
3. “Italy has included estimates of informal activity in their GDP calculations since 1987, which swells their GDP by an estimated 18% and in 2014, a number of European countries formally changed their GDP calculations to include prostitution and narcotics sales in their official GDP statistics, in line with international accounting standards, prompting an increase between 3–7%.”
NB: And what about the psychic rewards and costs as compared to the financial rewards and costs of paid out-of-the-home labor versus work at home?
https://www.imf.org/en/Blogs/Articles/2019/10/15/blog-the-economic-cost-of-devaluing-women-work
QUOTE OF THE MONTH
“Make your own Bible. Select and collect all the words and sentences that in all your readings have been to you like the blast of a trumpet.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson
My spin — then periodically review, re-rank, and exchange your list with those you love. I call this the “Orion Exchange” because seven is about as many as any human can digest at a time. Game?
ATTACHMENTS BELOW:
#1 A graphic guide to justice (9 metaphors on one page).
#2 “39 Songs, Prayers, and Poems: the Keys to the Hearts of Seven Billion People” — Adams House Senior Common Room Presentation, 11/17/20
PDF with headlines — Google Drive
YOUR TURN — Please share:
a.) the coolest thing you learned this week related to business, economics, finance.
b.) the coolest thing you learned in your life related to business, economics, finance.
c.) anything at all related to business, economics, finance.
d.) anything at all
