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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences
How (Not) To Count Indian Women's Work: Gendered Analyses And The Periodic Labour Force Survey, Smriti Rao
How (Not) To Count Indian Women's Work: Gendered Analyses And The Periodic Labour Force Survey, Smriti Rao
Economics, Finance and International Business Department Faculty Works
Unit-level Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS) data have been helpful in depicting the intensity of the employment crisis in India even before the Covid-19 related economic collapse. However, from the perspective of effective gendered analyses of the economy, the PLFS has failed to improve upon the old Employment–Unemployment Survey (EUS), and in one way has taken a step back, making it more difficult to understand the range and extent of women’s economic activities. It is past time that the National Sample Survey Organisation (NSSO) adopted the now well-established recommendations of feminist economists, and reformed its data definition and data collection …
Beyond The Coronavirus: Understanding Crises Of Social Reproduction, Smriti Rao
Beyond The Coronavirus: Understanding Crises Of Social Reproduction, Smriti Rao
Economics, Finance and International Business Department Faculty Works
From a feminist political economy perspective, the unfolding of the coronavirus is a further reminder of the fundamental contradiction between a capitalist system that prioritizes profits, and a feminist ethic that prioritizes life-making or social reproduction. This paper argues for a more systematic understanding of crises of social reproduction under capitalism, stressing the difference between such crises for labour, and those for capital. The coronavirus crisis represents an extraordinary example of a crisis of social reproduction for capital, but this paper examines crises of social reproduction for capital and labour that arise from the more ordinary workings of capitalism. The …
Migration, Crises And Social Transformation In India Since The 1990s, Smriti Rao, Vamsi Vakulabharanam
Migration, Crises And Social Transformation In India Since The 1990s, Smriti Rao, Vamsi Vakulabharanam
Economics and Global Studies Department Faculty Works
Since liberalization, urban migration in India has increased in quantity, but also changed in quality, with permanent marriage migration and temporary, circular employment migration rising, even as permanent economic migration remains stagnant. We understand internal migration in India to be a re-ordering of productive and reproductive labor that signifies a deep transformation of society. We argue that this transformation is a response to three overlapping crises: an agrarian crisis, an employment crisis, and a crisis of social reproduction. These are not crises for capitalist accumulation, which they enable. Rather, they make it impossible for a majority of Indians to achieve …
Reproductive Work And Female Labor Force Participation In Rural India, Sirisha C. Naidu, Smriti Rao
Reproductive Work And Female Labor Force Participation In Rural India, Sirisha C. Naidu, Smriti Rao
Economics and Global Studies Department Faculty Works
The current debate over female labor force participation in India has failed to sufficiently account for the reproductive work of women. Using NSS data on reproductive labor, we investigate the possibility that a “reproductive squeeze” raises the opportunity costs of labor force participation for women. A variety of multinomial logit regressions reveal a robust positive relationship between the shares of non-discretionary food and non-food expenditure and the likelihood of performing reproductive labor, relative to being in the labor force. We also find that an indicator of greater social provisioning by the state is positively correlated with rural women’s labor force …