Feminist Political Economy: A Global Perspective

By Sara Cantillon, Odile Mackett and Sara Stevano

Feminist political economy is essential to understanding the power relations and hierarchies that shape and sustain contemporary capitalism. Motivated by the rejection of gender-blind approaches in economics feminist political economy provides compelling insights into the relations between the economic, the social and the political in the reproduction of inequality.

Sara Cantillon, Odile Mackett and Sara Stevano have written a much-needed introduction to key topics in feminist political economy, including the global division of labour, social reproduction, child and elder care, the household and intra-household inequalities, labour market inequalities, welfare regimes, the feminization of poverty and economic indicators. The authors take a global perspective throughout and engage in debates that are relevant for the Global North and/or the Global South. The book offers readers a deeper and more nuanced understanding of the role of power relations and inequality in the economy and is suitable for a variety of courses in political economy, feminism, gender studies, economics, social policy and development studies.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Agenda Publishing
• Release date: Oct 12, 2023
• ISBN: 9781788215466

Sara Cantillon

Sara Cantillon is Professor of Economics and Gender and Director of the Wise Centre for Economic Justice at Glasgow Caledonian University. She is President-Elect of the International Association for Feminist Economics.

Book preview

Feminist Political Economy

Feminist Political Economy

A Global Perspective

Sara Cantillon, Odile Mackett and Sara Stevano

This book is dedicated to our families (Jack, Dearbhla, Francis, Randy, Rey, Gemma, Daniele and Angelos) and to all those who continue to fight the feminist struggles for us all.

© Sara Cantillon, Odile Mackett and Sara Stevano 2023

This book is copyright under the Berne Convention.

No reproduction without permission.

All rights reserved.

First published in 2023 by Agenda Publishing

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ISBN 978-1-78821-263-2 (hardcover)

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Contents

Foreword

Preface

Acknowledgements

1A global perspective on feminist political economy

2Global division of labour

3Social reproduction

4Care

5Households

6Intra-household inequalities

7Labour market inequalities

8Welfare regimes

9Feminization of poverty

10Economic crises

11GDP and its alternatives

Bibliography

Index

Foreword

This book provides an extremely valuable resource to all those interested in a joined-up analysis of key issues in feminist political economy. It is a very useful as well as a very timely book that lays out the basic contours of a feminist political economy from a global perspective. A political economy approach, as the authors explain, is concerned with how the structures of power in global, national and local contexts shape the operation and outcomes of economic forces. The book combines feminist concerns with gender and its intersection with other forms of inequality with this political economy approach. The authors examine how the intersectional nature of inequalities is an essential frame for understanding the different manifestations of power as they operate through the domains of production and reproduction across the world, reconstituting, modifying or transforming the institutions of states, markets and households. The book sets out a macro-level analysis of how the global division of labour between men and women, between paid and unpaid work and between households and markets emerged through the interplay of global forces, initially as an aspect of the colonial world order and then, in contemporary times, through the workings of the neocolonial order that took its place.

The timeliness of the book lies in the global scope of the analysis. As the authors argue, the need for a global perspective does not lie simply in the increasing visibility of unequal global interconnections as economies open up (or are opened up) to global competition but also in uncovering the roots of these unequal interconnections in an earlier era of primitive accumulation, when the capitalist expansion of the West proceeded through the expropriation of land and the extraction of resources and labour in territories inhabited by those constructed as uncivilized, unproductive and, in essence, inferior to the colonizers. A feminist approach to questions of political economy is cognizant of the long history of exploitation that produced the intersectional inequalities of today: class inequalities, yes, but also their intersection with the subordinations associated with gender, caste, ethnicity, race and national identity.

The book also addresses the interconnected relationships between labour markets and households, and hence between paid work that is recognized and counted and the shadow economy of unpaid work. Again, the authors pay special attention to the broader structures of the reproductive economy, the structural processes and everyday practices that reproduce human life and the allocation of labour into different social classes, as well as the care economy embedded within it. They also trace the ways in which power inequalities within the household are structured and the unequal terms on which men and women are able to participate in the labour market, comparing how mainstream economics explains (or fails to address) these inequalities and what a feminist political economy has offer.

The final section of the book takes us into the policy domain. Here the focus is on how global interconnections and the inequalities they generate have helped to engender and shape the various crises the world has experienced in recent times – crises engendered by structural adjustment policies, financial crises, the climate crisis and, of course, most recently, the Covid-19 pandemic. Cantillon, Mackett and Stevano interrogate state policies across the world from an anti-poverty standpoint and find them marked by biases of various kinds that reflect the economistic worldview of those who dominate the levers of power. The book concludes with the question that progressive groups across the world are asking: should we really continue relying on gross domestic product (GDP) as a measure of how well the people of the world are doing or should we be considering moving to a different metric, one more capable of capture what matters to people?

Naila Kabeer

London

Preface

This book represents the encounter of three feminist scholars committed to a power-centred understanding of the economy. We are from different generations and countries but we all work in the fields of political economy and economics in critical and interdisciplinary ways. Our own journeys, intellectual interests and differences, as well as dilemmas, are reflected in this book, which has a primary aim to systematize the rich, complex and variegated knowledge in feminist political economy around a selection of key topics so as to provide an overview of the foundational insights and debates in this area of enquiry.

The book has been a long time in the making. Although this was partly a result of other work and life commitments, it was also because the book itself, which had appeared a quite straightforward proposition, turned out to be a more complex endeavour, marked by several periods of reflection and introspection on our own understanding of feminist political economy.

Our initial idea was to draw on our teaching practice and write up some of the classes we have taught working from our slides, resources and relevant literature in courses such as the Feminist Political Economy & Development summer school at SOAS University of London, the Feminist Political Economy: Concepts and Tools to Analyse Intersecting Inequalities at the Central European University, the Feminist Economics summer school organized by the Institute for Economic Justice in Johannesburg, the Social Thought and Political Economy Program at the University of Massachusetts – Amherst or the Political Economy of Inequality module on the Equality Studies MSc at University College Dublin. Yet, in the process of writing, new questions emerged that caused a revision of the structure of the book as well as the topics to select, the most relevant starting point and how best to link the various areas, let alone the bigger issue of defining the burgeoning field of feminist political economy and identifying its boundaries. It is, therefore, the result of our extended process of writing and evolving interpretations and engagements with feminist political economy. So, for example, the chapter on the global division of labour, which was meant to frame the following one on labour market inequalities, turned out to be the chapter we felt was best suited to frame the whole book. The chapters on households and intra-household inequalities, which were initially intended to provide the foundational blocs to subsequent chapters, are now located in the middle of the book, as a transition from the big feminist topics of social reproduction and care to the consideration of inequalities in households and labour markets.

A commitment that has remained unchanged since the beginning of the project is the global perspective to feminist political economy, which we believe is unique and provides a much-needed contribution to the gap in this area. A global perspective is necessary, not only because of the reality of a globally interconnected world, particularly in the context of late twentieth-century globalization, but also because contemporary global hierarchies are historically determined and structured by gender, race and class. By global perspective, we mean an account of key feminist political economy topics that consider the importance of location in the global economy and that illustrate the intersecting inequalities of global capitalism. We use the broad distinction between the Global South and North to highlight this commitment and our understanding of structural inequalities operating at the global level. Each chapter presents literature and case studies on/from/for various contexts in the South and in the North. Such an approach embodies our expertise, as one of us (Sara Cantillon) has worked mostly, although not exclusively, on contexts in the Global North, while the other two of us (Odile Mackett and Sara Stevano) focus on the Global South and the African continent in particular. In fact, there may be a bias in favour of the literature on African countries, but such a bias is so uncommon, and these viewpoints from the peripheries so neglected, that we hope the reader will forgive us for this.

Two important cross-cutting themes, climate change and the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic, appear in various chapters of the book as key areas of public and, more specifically, feminist concern. The ramifications produced by these crises, which may in time prove to be existential turning points, can be analysed through different areas of engagement in feminist political economy. These are reflected in the organization of the book, albeit in a selective, and not exhaustive, manner.

This book is intended for advanced undergraduate and postgraduate students across the social sciences. Feminist political economy is an inherently interdisciplinary field, and therefore the presentation of the topics is meant to be accessible not only to students of political economy and/or economics but to anyone with a familiarity with the social sciences who is interested in gaining or deepening their knowledge on the feminist approaches to political economy. The nature of certain topics as our own inclination and positionality, as we are all trained in economics, might mean that there are some parts where an economic standpoint is more noticeable, but we have paid attention to unpack the economic jargon and make it accessible to non-economists. We hope that this book can provide some inspiration to our feminist colleagues who may face similar questions and dilemmas when setting up a course on these themes. Each chapter concludes with a set of takeaway messages, discussion questions and resources that students and teachers can use to assess comprehension and expand engagement with specific issues. Mainstream political economy approaches underplay recognition of the hierarchies that shape economic behaviour and opportunities. Feminist political economy addresses this weakness by making visible the inequalities on which the economy exists, particularly in relation to women, people of colour and those from poorer backgrounds. We believe that making feminist political economy accessible and interesting to students from across the social sciences contributes to the erosion of these exclusionary practices and can be liberating for many students and scholars of political economy.

Acknowledgements

Writing this book has been a genuinely collective enterprise, not only between the authors but also with those without whose help it would have been a much harder endeavour. We most especially wish to thank Sara Riccio for her extensive assistance with case studies, referencing, editing and everything in between. Sara’s help was invaluable and much appreciated. Many thanks too to Katy Gillespie and Dominic Lo, who assisted in the final stages.

This book draws upon our teaching experiences on Feminist Political Economy courses, which were made possible through collaboration with many inspiring feminist colleagues, including Alessandra Mezzadri, Hannah Bargawi, Lorena Lombardozzi, Kalpana Wilson, Feyzi Ismail, Marzia Fontana, Eva Fodor and Elissa Helms at SOAS University of London and the Central European University, the organizers of the Feminist Economics Summer School at the Institute for Economic Justice in Johannesburg, and Nancy Folbre at the University of Massachusetts – Amherst; we thank all of them for the enriching exchanges. Thanks also go to our students, whose engagement and viewpoints have helped us develop and make better sense of it all. We also wish to acknowledge and thank our colleagues and friends at SOAS University of London, Wits University and the Wise Centre for Economic Justice, Glasgow, with whom we discussed these topics and from whose own work we have learned a great deal.

We thank Naila Kabeer for graciously agreeing to read this tome and write the Foreword. Naila is this book’s matchmaker, as she connected us at the beginning of the process. Naila is revered by many feminist researchers, activists and practitioners for her long-standing commitment to a Global South perspective and to those whose voices often go unheard. We are honoured and grateful for her contribution. Thanks too go to Diane Elson and Lyn Ossome for having read parts of the earlier drafts of the book and provided detailed and helpful feedback, and to discussants Nina Teasdale and Angela O’Hagan at the roundtable at the International Association for Feminist Economics (IAFFE) conference in Cape Town in 2023.

We also thank our editor, Alison Howson, and all those at Agenda Publishing for their assistance, and especially their patience, on this journey.

We are indebted to all the people who make research in feminist political economy possible – people who, as they go about their busy lives, are so generous to gift researchers with their time and stories. The vast amount of research we tried to systematize in this volume exists only thanks to such generosity.

1

A global perspective on feminist political economy

1.1 Introduction

For the past decade or so, following the 2008 global economic recession, concerns with wealth and income inequality have become a mainstream issue in many policy-making arenas. According to the latest World Inequality Report (Chancel et al. 2021), income and wealth inequalities within countries have increased to the point that global contemporary inequalities are at similar levels to where they were at the peak of Western imperialism. Thomas Piketty’s focus on wealth, and in particular the top 1 per cent of income earners, has ensured that talk about the 1 per cent is entrenched in public debate (Piketty 2014). The necessity of tackling inequality has been made even more urgent because of the Covid-19 pandemic and the multiple crises it has unleashed, throwing into sharp relief not only income or wealth inequality but, crucially, also gender, race and class inequalities. The intensification of several inequalities throughout the era of neoliberalism threatens to roll back many hard-won gains towards social and economic justice and has given rise to a renewal of social protest and other forms of civic engagement.

Prior to the most recent global crises many scholars had long traced social movements and highlighted the social, political and economic injustices created by persistent structural inequalities of income and wealth, gender, race and class. Feminists have struggled to foreground gender inequalities in economics and in political economy, and have often taken issue with mainstream thinkers who have traditionally considered the economy neutral and void of conflict, and with Marxist thinkers, who saw it as being structured on the lines of class conflict alone (see Folbre 1986 for a critique). For many feminists, gender inequality cannot be seen in isolation from mainstream economic issues. Marxist feminist traditions have long studied the interplay of gender and class; Black feminisms have centred the critical importance of race with Angela Davis’ Women, Race and Class, first published over 40 years ago (Davis 1981), which is emblematic of this. Current feminist scholarship and activism draw on these lines of engagement and extend them into the context of globalized and financialized capitalism. For example, social reproduction feminisms seek to put forward a unitary understanding of gender oppression and capitalism (Bhattacharya 2017), whereas the feminist strike for equality sought to create a space to challenge the invisibility of many forms of work (Gago 2020 [2019]) and the questions of survival in the Global South exposed the precarity of life for the expanding surplus population (Ossome & Naidu 2021).

Bringing together the experience of marginalization based on economic and social grounds, the slogan We are the 99% has formed the basis of the social movements – from Occupy to the International Women’s Strike – in the United States and elsewhere. Social movements have played a key role in bringing awareness to economic and social justice issues, and, in some instances, more tangible legislative changes have emerged from their work. For example, the influential and global work of LGBTQ+ social movements has significantly contributed to the legalization of same-sex marriages in many countries around the world. Many human rights movements have engaged directly with colonialism, slavery, racism and segregation, among other issues, leading to the creation of a number of important civil society organizations, such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch (Human Rights Campaign n.d.; Tsutsui & Wotipka 2004). More recently, these have included the #MeToo and the Black Lives Matter movements (Jaffe 2018; Pellegrini 2018; Francis & Wright-Rigueur 2021). All of the above activism examples have addressed social and economic issues that are central to the concerns of feminist political economists.

Aside from injustice arguments against excessive economic and social inequality, increasing attention is being paid to the costs of such inequalities. These costs are evident across political, economic and social contexts in terms of macroeconomic stability, the democratic process, social cohesion and social mobility. Within academia, and especially within broader social movements, there has been a sustained interrogation of the validity of the neoclassical and/or neoliberal approach for understanding how the economy might better serve human, social and environmental needs. Combined, they suggest the prospect of a broader – more heterodox – concept of political economy that may return both economics and political economy to the wider canvass of enquiry that engaged Adam Smith, Karl Marx and their contemporaries.

Further, some international organizations and national governments, at least rhetorically, are beginning to shift their focus to acknowledge the importance of tackling inequality. The detrimental socio-economic impact of inequality has unravelled and been made visible by the multiple health, economic and other crises generated, or accelerated, by the Covid-19 pandemic. Indeed, the global Covid-19 crisis has starkly exposed the dependence of formal economies, and the daily functioning of families and communities, on the invisible and unpaid care labour often carried out by women, alongside the underpaid labour carried out by marginalized groups. However, inequalities of gender, class and race, among others, continue to be addressed separately from what are perceived as purely economic concerns. In this context, we believe that a feminist political economy (FPE) approach can offer adequate conceptual frameworks and methodological tools to analyse the articulation of multiple and intersecting inequalities and their wider implications for the world economy. The Covid-19 pandemic disproportionately affected women, negatively leading to their experiencing higher employment losses and income insecurity in service industries, alongside taking on further unequal shares of unpaid care work. In addition, violence against women both in the home and in public spaces increased exponentially during the pandemic’s lockdowns and movement restrictions; in light of the serious gendered consequences of Covid-19, the United Nations named the mass endemic of domestic abuse against women the shadow pandemic (UN Women 2021). Furthermore, on the basis of past economic crises, the impacts on women’s economic security typically last much longer than men’s, with a prolonged dip in women’s income and labour force participation expected. Prior to Covid-19 women were in a more precarious position than most men (earning less, holding less secure jobs, more likely to be employed in the informal sector, experiencing decreased access to social protection, more likely to be lone parents, carrying a disproportionate amount of unpaid childcare, etc.), so their capacity to absorb economic shocks was lower than the majority of men. Hence, without the appropriate intervention, the pandemic’s impact will have long-term negative effects for women. Key to identifying the appropriate steps is the recognition that the pandemic has both deepened existing inequalities and exposed the vulnerabilities in our economic and social systems, which, in turn, amplify the impacts of the pandemic. If we accept this basic premise, then the steps taken to curb the impact of Covid-19 – in the short and longer term – will prioritize gender, encouraging a reorientation towards making transformative changes in economic policy to enable a more resilient, caring and sustainable economy.

Mainstream economic/political economy approaches tend, at best, to underplay recognition of the hierarchies that shape economic behaviour and opportunities. Feminist political economy addresses this weakness by making visible the inequalities on which the economy exists. In this book, we try to provide an overview of FPE scholarship, drawing on Global North and Global South perspectives alike as well as adopting an intersectional approach.

1.2 Origins of feminist political economy

What do we mean when we talk of feminist political economy? And in what way might it make a contribution that distinguishes it from other political economy and feminist approaches? Broadly speaking, we can think of feminist political economy as an interdisciplinary academic field located primarily at the intersections of feminist economics, political economy, gender and development (Rai & Waylen 2014), areas that are also in themselves often interlinked with local and global feminist movements. Within FPE, there are a myriad of terms that attempt to identify separate, but overlapping, fields of enquiry, including feminist international political economy and the feminist political economy of development (Mezzadri, Newman & Stevano 2022). There is much cross-pollination among feminist economics, feminist political economy and feminist international political economy, and crude distinctions between these areas of enquiry are inevitably reductionist. However, based on disciplinary locations and sites of publication (e.g. academic journals), it can be argued that feminist economics resides in the field of economics, and feminist political economy in the field of political economy (which is intrinsically more interdisciplinary) and that feminist international political economy is part of feminist thinking in international relations. All of these are responses to mainstream economics, political economy and international political economy approaches. It is a complex, still emerging area, as Nancy Folbre astutely acknowledges:

Political economy is such a contested term. Almost everyone has their own definition of it. I am no exception. I like to highlight what my own theoretical efforts are reaching for: a clear understanding of the dialectic between individual choice, collective identity and action, and structural inequality … I think the conventional paradigmatic boundaries of economics are weakening and the field is gradually being reconfigured in ways that differ significantly from both classical and neoclassical approaches. Feminist theory is playing an important part in this process.

(Cantillon 2016: 485)

In this section we begin by trying to untangle the meaning of political economy to understand both the development, and the necessity, of a feminist political economy perspective and to see where, and how, it confronts and contributes to more mainstream approaches. In doing so, we show the intellectual contribution of FPE to the development of broader theories and conceptual frameworks that recognize gender, and other inequalities, as being fundamental to the diverse forms of exclusion and exploitation of global capitalism.

So, starting off: what do we mean when we talk of political economy? Generally speaking, we can think of political economy as the study of how different economic theories and/or systems reflect the political context in which they operate – that is, how a country, a region or any given context is governed, taking into account political, economic and social factors. In taking a multidisciplinary approach, it seeks to understand how history, culture and customs are dialectically related to an economic system and how political forces shape economic interactions. Henry Bernstein (2010) has formulated the four key questions of political economy. (1) Who owns what? (2) Who does what? (3) Who gets what? (4) What do they do with it? These guiding questions point to ownership and property relations, the social division of labour, the distribution of income and the social relations of consumption, reproduction and accumulation. In essence, political economy is concerned with the social relations that underpin production and consumption. Hence, it recognizes the fictitious nature of the economic as detached from the social, the political and the cultural – a theme both foundational to and further developed in feminist thinking. At its centre, political economy critically explores power relations and questions of distribution, marginalization and exploitation.

The discipline of political economy has come full circle in so far as it was the common term used for what we now call economics, as well as other branches of the social sciences. The early political economists, including Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill and Karl Marx, drew on a number of disciplines to formulate their theories, including politics, philosophy, law and history. Classical political economy, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, explained economic activity as being mutually generated by social, cultural and historical forces. In particular, classical political economy was concerned with income distribution, as put by Ricardo (1951 [1817]: 5):

The produce of the earth – all that is derived from its surface by the united application of labour, machinery, and capital – is divided among three classes of the community; namely, the proprietor of the land, the owner of the stock of capital … and the labourers … But in different stages of society, the proportions of the whole produce of the earth which will be allotted to each of these classes, under the name of rent, profit, and wages, will be essentially different … To determine the laws which regulate this distribution, is the principal problem in Political Economy …

Classical political economists were primarily interested in uncovering how income came to be distributed to the different social classes constituting society, which required a theoretical understanding of hierarchies among such classes. However, later on, with subsequent developments in economic thinking, the analysis of distribution was mathematically formalized and fundamentally detached from its roots in social class structures and hierarchies (Pasinetti 2000). The question of distribution, or, more broadly, inequality, was sidelined and ultimately came to be regarded as unimportant, in favour of the quest for efficiency. Likewise, the holistic approach to economic issues was gradually eclipsed with a move towards disciplines that were more narrowly focused – both conceptually and methodologically –such as economics, sociology and political science. These separate areas of enquiry focused on particular elements of the economy/society at the expense of a broader view of social interactions. Economics was particularly egregious in this regard in separating itself through greater formalism, abstraction and specialization as a discipline separate from political economy. This separation, led by Alfred Marshall, reflected a general academic trend towards specialization along methodological lines and implicitly privileged the science of economics over political economy. This so-called marginalist revolution and the subsequent emergence of neoclassical economics narrowed the scope of the economy to the market domain and its focus on the self-interested individual as the basic unit of analysis. From a feminist perspective, this narrowing was especially detrimental to women and our understanding of inequality more broadly. This was particularly true in its methodological focus on individuals and the formalizing of markets as the primary domain of economic activity. These market activities were conceptualized as discrete spheres, separate from state and non-market activities. However, markets do not operate in a vacuum but are social institutions that depend for their operation on background property rules and a complex of social, cultural and legal institutions (Satz 2010). It is often overlooked that it is a relatively recent phenomenon that market exchanges are thought of as neutral or transcending political and social questions. Smith himself saw the study of markets as an outgrowth of moral philosophy, yet the Wealth of Nations and its imagery of the invisible hand were seized upon as a guiding light for free markets in the twentieth century, while its forerunner and necessary companion, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, gathered dust (Cantillon & O’Connor 2021).

The revival of political economy in the late twentieth century and early twenty-first century suggests a recognition of the need for a broader framework for understanding complex issues, such as the recurrence of crises and growing inequalities, at both national and international levels. It can also be explained by the increased role of government in the economy and the subsequent need to account for the behaviour of the public sector and its interaction with the structure of the economy, as well as the emergence of new theoretical approaches, especially institutional economics, which has renewed the focus on the relevance of social structures, contracts, transaction costs and collective action. The broad field of modern political economy contains several subject areas, including the politics of economic relations, national political and economic issues, comparative studies and international political economy. The re-emergence of the discipline of political economy marked a positive return to more holistic understandings of the interrelationships between individuals, states, markets and society.

Although the interdisciplinary nature of classical and modern political economy has much in common with feminist approaches, political economy, both historically and currently, remains gender-blind. What was missing from classical political economy, and is still missing from its return, is any feminist perspective (e.g. Rao & Akram-Lodhi 2021). Such a perspective is more fundamental than adding women, or a gender analysis in terms of differential outcomes, but, rather, necessitates a recognition of how gender is embedded in all economic and social relations (e.g. Figart 1997). FPE seeks to enable an understanding of the relationships between social, political and economic structures of power and resources, focusing on how production and reproduction are socially organized.

A number of key features distinguish the FPE approach. First, it has a broader conceptual framework than mainstream political economy and economics, thanks to its realms of interest extending beyond the state and the market economy to include the household, the family, the community and the work of social reproduction. In this way, FPE gives visibility to the lived experiences, work and contributions of marginalized social groups. In fact, FPE goes beyond the expansion of the sites of socio-economic activity and challenges the fictitious separation of the public and the private. Taking the homeworker as an example, Prügl (2020: 8) puts this problematic in these terms:

I have arrived at an off place with private households emerging as sites of ruthlessly exploitative labour and the public state as the site of household rule, caring for its population. The figure of the home-based worker led me there as she disobeys the separation of public and private spheres in Political Economy. She makes visible the home as a site of exploitation and value production, bringing into view household as both deeply gendered and historically variable, and highlights the way in which state policies draw on patriarchal household rule when inventing varieties of gender regimes. But she also instructs us that households are at the core of politics and economics, and invites us to theorize householding beyond frozen dichotomies of public and private.

Second, FPE not only documents the existence of gender inequalities but also analyses how these inequalities, which are co-constituted with class and race inequalities, are fundamental to the functioning of both the current capitalist and previous economic systems (Folbre 2021). Patriarchal and capitalist relations come together in the system of capitalist-patriarchy (Mies 1986), not only to uphold discrimination against women but also to ensure the perpetuation of capitalism. As put by Maria Mies (1986: 38), It is my thesis that capitalism cannot function without patriarchy, that the goal of this system, namely the never-ending process of capital accumulation, cannot be achieved unless patriarchal man–woman relations are maintained or newly created. Ultimately, FPE is concerned with articulating a better understanding of capitalism, foregrounding the role of inequalities in its workings.

Third, FPE employs a plurality of methodological approaches characterized by critical, theoretically rich and empirically grounded research, including contextual, reflexive and qualitative methods, as well as those of a quantitative orientation. One central theme is the role of power relations in knowledge production and the androcentric bias in the economic science. FPE highlights not only the under-representation of women in the formulation and practice of economics but also the distinctly masculinist foundations of the neoclassical epistemology. Finally, FPE allows for an intersectional analysis that looks not at just gender but at how different systems of power, and access to power, interact and impact different groups in society – that is, the ways that inequalities based on gender interact with inequalities based, for example, on race/ethnicity, class and citizenship (Arruzza 2016; Ferguson 2019).

These features are evident in the key areas of analysis in FPE, including social reproduction; production/consumption, labour market inequalities and intra-household inequalities; the nature of exchange within and between private and public spheres, and especially the gendered division of unpaid care work and its impact on gender equality; and critiques of economic and social progress and progress towards better indicators of human well-being. Last, another key feature of FPE is understanding the impact of globalization and the changing relationship between states, markets, and civil society and non-governmental organizations (NGOs).

The gradual surfacing of a feminist political economy perspective provides a focus on the complex ways in which institutions, power relations and exploitation are embedded in economic relations. FPE approaches aim to explain the underlying structural inequalities and processes that influence women’s material conditions and increase their risk of vulnerability. For example, in relation to care, FPE examines how gender interacts with concepts of reciprocity, implicit contracts of care and how social norms are constructed in ways that reinforce women’s responsibility for care. According to Smriti Rao and Haroon Akram-Lodhi (2021), the recent revival of FPE is to be seen as part of a new wave of Marxist-feminist scholarship and activism, coalescing around social reproduction feminism. FPE, in all its varieties, aims at connecting the macro and micro processes and relations in a variety of capitalist circuits across the global economy, illustrating the intricate relations between women and the state, and captures the voices, daily rhythms, and complex work arrangements characterizing women’s lives under global capitalism (Mezzadri, Newman & Stevano 2022: 16). In doing so, FPE makes an intellectual contribution that fills the gaps in knowledge from mainstream political economy approaches. It contributes to the development of broader theories and conceptual frameworks that recognize gender inequalities as fundamental to the functioning of the economic system, and places discrimination on the basis of gender, race and class at the core of global capitalism and its diverse forms of exclusion and exploitation.

1.3 Why a global perspective?

Why does this book frame feminist political economy in terms of a global perspective? And what does it mean to take a global perspective in FPE? These are crucial questions that define how we conceptualize and use FPE approaches. The imperative of a global perspective may appear justified by the mere reality of a globally interconnected world, widely recognized as such particularly in the context of the late twentieth-century globalization. Writing in the aftermath of the 2008 Global Financial Crisis, in New Frontiers in Feminist Political Economy, Shirin Rai and Georgina Waylen (2014: 2) note that gender analyses can no longer be embedded in the study of development that is exclusively focused on the Global South but necessitate a global political economy. In contemporary capitalism, crises tend to expose the interconnected nature of economies and societies across the world, as they are easily transmitted across countries despite originating in specific contexts. The crisis triggered by the Covid-19 pandemic threw into sharp relief not only spatial interconnectedness but also how health impacts are inherently shaped by social, economic and political processes, and, for this reason, it has been defined as a syndemic¹ (Horton 2020). The Covid-19 crisis reinvigorated debates on the global nature of issues such as poverty and inequality, which led influential development scholars to call for a global development paradigm that transcends South–North divides (Leach et al. 2021; Oldekop et al. 2020). Although the global interconnections are certainly an important reason why global perspectives are needed, the significance of taking a global perspective in FPE runs much deeper than this.

The starting point should be to investigate the origins of the contemporary structure of the global economy. Globalization, by which we mean a process associated with increasing economic openness, interdependence and integration of countries in the world economy, is not a new phenomenon that started in the 1980s. The globalization of the late twentieth century – that is, neoliberal globalization – is only the most recent iteration of a much longer process of internationalization of production and exchange that can be traced back to at least the thirteenth century (Nayyar 2019). What has changed with the different phases of globalization is the modes of integration, especially in the global division of labour underpinning specific forms of production and exchange. For instance, the arm’s-length trade typical of the late nineteenth century was replaced by trade in subcomponents in the context of global supply chains in the twentieth century, and the laws that regulated the movement of labour changed too, with a tendency to become more restrictive over time (Nayyar 2019; Kaplinsky 2000). Much analysis has focused on how the neoliberal economic paradigm promoted trade openness, export orientation and liberalization as a political choice (Nissanke & Thorbecke 2010).

A key debate in political economy of development has been over the effects of neoliberal globalization on growth, poverty and inequality – and whether globalization has generated greater prosperity or impoverishment. Feminist analyses are a fundamental component of these debates, and at least two key streams can be identified. First, FPE studies changes in gendered labour force participation rates, driven by the relocation of production from the Global North to the Global South and its implications on working conditions, empowerment and well-being in different locations. For instance, FPE focuses on what pushes or pulls women into the labour force and whether participating in the labour force commonly leads to women facing a double burden of work or, instead, can provide them with autonomy and their individual bargaining power (see Chapter 2 on the global division of labour). Second, feminist (political) economists analyse how economic policies of liberalization, privatization and stabilization have gendered implications, both locally and across contexts (see Chapter 10 on economic crises and policies). The FPE literature clearly demonstrates that the globalization of the late twentieth century is a gendered process in that it has shaped gender relations in labour markets and families, alongside influencing gendered access to resources, impacting our general well-being. Therefore, a global perspective is necessary to capture these gendered dynamics, as the global organization of production and reproduction – most notably in global supply and care chains (themes discussed at length in Chapters 2 and 4 in particular) – implies that a policy change introduced in a certain context will have knock-on effects in other contexts across the world.

Nonetheless, a critical aspect is to question how different locations, as well as considering the people within them, relate to one another and how they are positioned in the global economy. To address this point, it is necessary to take a step back and examine how the development of capitalism has gone hand in hand with colonialism. Contemporary hierarchies in the global economy have their roots in the international economic order created by