Critical and Feminist Perspectives on Financial and Economic Crises

Sakiko Fukuda-Parr,James Heintz,Stephanie Seguino

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317519188
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Economic and financial crises have become perennial features of today's global economy. Macroeconomic theories of crisis, including the global crisis that unfolded in 2008, emphasize the role of financial deregulation; capital flow imbalances; and growing debt, fueled by income and wealth inequality. These approaches tend to be divorced from feminist thinking which analyzes broader distributional dynamics transmitted through structural channels and government policy responses, with an emphasis on gender, race, class and ethnicity. This volume brings together innovative thinking from heterodox macroeconomists and feminist economists to explore the causes, consequences, and ramifications of economic crises. By doing so, it highlights aspects of the economy that are frequently overlooked or ignored, such as the impact of crises on the vast amount of unpaid work which women perform relative to men. The collection of international studies assembled here takes an innovative approach to analyzing a range of issues, from the subprime mortgage crisis to the gendered effects of austerity to the role of the International Monetary Fund in governing an unstable global economy. In so doing, it looks beyond causes and consequences and points to new directions for macroeconomic and financial policy. This book was originally published as a special issue of Feminist Economics.

CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES ON FINANCIAL AND ECONOMIC CRISES: HETERODOX MACROECONOMICS MEETS FEMINIST ECONOMICS

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Sakiko Fukuda-Parr, James Heintz, and Stephanie Seguino¹

ABSTRACT

This contribution brings together various strands of analysis about the causes, consequences, and policy ramifications of economic crises, with a specific focus on distributional dynamics. It aims to facilitate a conversation between macroeconomic theorists of crises and instability and feminist economists and scholars of intergroup inequality. Macroeconomic analyses of the Great Recession have centered on the causal role of financial deregulation, capital flow imbalances, and growth of income and wealth inequality. That work tends to be divorced from research that analyzes broader distributional impacts, prior to the crisis and subsequently, transmitted through economic channels and government responses. This study’s framework emphasizes the role of stratification along multiple trajectories – race, class, and gender – in contributing to economic crises and in shaping their distributional dynamics. The study underscores the long-run effects of the 2008 crisis on well-being, highlighted in feminist economists’ research on social reproduction and often missed in the macroeconomics literature.

INTRODUCTION: THE UNHAPPY COLLISION OF ECONOMIC CRISIS AND INEQUALITY

Periodic crisis is a feature of capitalist economies, long noted by Marx, Keynes, Minsky, Kindleberger, and a plethora of heterodox economists. So, too, is the reproduction of intergroup inequality, whether by race, gender, or class. The large number of economic crises over the past several decades – originating in both developed and developing countries – has weighed more heavily on economically and socially subordinate groups. But increased inequality is not only an effect of economic crisis. At the most basic level, economic inequality is a structural vulnerability that can itself lead to financial crisis.

Some observers have gone so far as to suggest that gender inequality is at the root of the 2008 global economic crisis (Elisabeth Prügl 2012). France’s then Finance Minister, Christine Lagarde (2010), for example, claimed that had the Lehman Brothers been the Lehman Sisters, financial managers would likely have exhibited a greater sense of responsibility and pragmatism. Others, such as Scott E. Page (2007), have argued more generally that homogenous organizations that lack intellectual, ethnic, and gender diversity perform more poorly than more heterogeneous organizations. Inequality as evidenced by homogeneity, Page argues, limits the breadth of ideas and perspectives and, as a result, hampers the quality of decision making.

The various strands of crisis theory, and their relationship to distributional dynamics, have not yet come together to form a unified whole. In part that is because assessments of the distributional effects of the crisis are fragmented. Most heterodox macroeconomic studies examine income and employment effects while feminist studies not only disaggregate these effects by gender, but also frame the issues in a broader conception of well-being and nonmarket dimensions of the economy. Another reason is that assessments differ in the degree to which they encompass a framework that identifies the structural factors that lead to the crisis in the first place. Moreover, there is often a weak understanding of the role of different forms of inequality as a causal factor in creating conditions of fragility that are conducive to crises. Heterodox macroeconomists and those concerned with intergroup inequality therefore have a lot to learn from each other in providing a deeper analysis of economic crises.

In this introduction, we do not provide a synopsis of the contents of the studies making up the special issue, but rather take a different approach. The primary goal of this introduction is to sketch a framework for bringing together the various strands of analysis about the causes, consequences, and policy ramifications of economic and financial crises, with a specific focus on distributional dynamics. Specifically, the framework presented here aims to facilitate a conversation between macroeconomic theorists of crises and instability, on the one hand, and feminist economists and scholars of intergroup inequality, on the other. The studies in this volume elaborate on various aspects of these themes. Our goal here is to show how these threads are intertwined. By bringing these avenues of scholarship under one roof, we wish to generate the intellectual cross-fertilization that can yield a more robust analysis of crises, with an ability to highlight multiple forms of inequality and not only short-run but also longer-run impacts.

This contribution begins with a review of explanations of the 2008 crisis coming primarily from heterodox and structuralist macroeconomics, including the relationships between inequality and economic crises, Hyman Minsky’s financial fragility hypothesis, and the role of global imbalances. Building on the idea that much of the analysis of economic crisis remains too narrowly focused, this study also examines how an alternative normative framework, one rooted in the capabilities approach, affects our interpretation of and response to crises. We then ask the question: what is the value-added of feminist economics to the analysis of financial and economic crises? We highlight the important contributions of stratification economics and gender analysis in enriching our understanding of economic crises. One of the contributions of feminist thinking has been to identify aspects of the economy that profoundly affect well-being, but that are ignored by most macroeconomic analysis, such as unpaid care work.

HETERODOX MACROECONOMICS: WHAT DO THE THEORIES SAY ABOUT CRISIS?

Two key trends in the developed world form the backdrop of the 2008 global financial crisis.² The first is the growth of household income and wealth inequality, and the second is the process of financialization. We discuss these two trends in turn, and link them to the emergence of global imbalances involving the high-income countries of the Global North and increasingly influential players from the Global South. Since the proximate causes of this crisis could be found within the United States economy and financial markets, much of the following discussion centers on the US. However, a similar analysis can be applied to crisis situations in other countries and at other points in time, with the details varying with the circumstances.

Expanding inequalities

The growth of household income inequality within and between countries has been evident since the 1970s, coinciding with the onset of the most recent period of trade, financial, and investment deregulation. These trends can be linked to an asymmetric relationship between owners of productive capital and institutions controlling financial assets, on the one hand, and workers and governments, on the other. The unevenness of power emerges because more mobile resources – fixed and financial capital – have a global range of options for production and investment and, as a result greater bargaining power than labor and governments. These unequal power dynamics have contributed to greater inequality and provide one explanation for the rising Gini coefficient within a number of countries (including the US) as well as between countries.³

Figure 1 Average real wages of production workers and productivity in the US, 1964–2009

Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics (2013).

Focusing on the tails of the distribution of household income, José Gabriel Palma (2011) argues that country-level Gini coefficients fail to capture what really matters, the income shares of the rich. Using an international dataset, he finds that the share of the middle is relatively stable from 1947 to 2007, and that redistribution is primarily to the top 10 percent from the bottom 40 percent. The latter group, Palma argues, lacks the bargaining power to claim its fair share of the economic pie, even as productivity has risen. Figure 1 provides a stark example of this for the US, with real wages falling as productivity has risen since 1974. Palma’s findings are consistent with studies showing a rising profit share of income, and in particular, rentier income, in countries at varying stages of development (Philip Arestis and Elias Karakitsos 2011; International Labour Organization 2011).

These regressive distributional shifts stand in contrast to the post-war period of wage-led growth in industrialized countries of the Global North – the so-called “Golden Age of Capitalism” from 1945 to 1973. Over that time, wages rose along with GDP, and firms reinvested their profits to expand output to meet rising demand. This created a virtuous cycle of low unemployment, rising wages, increased demand, and profitable new investment opportunities. However, the golden age was far less golden when we consider distributional outcomes along other dimensions, such as gender, race, and ethnicity (Robert B. Reich 2008). For instance, the US economy typified the golden age, yet in the 1950s and 1960s economic opportunities available to women were sharply curtailed, and inequalities based on race were extreme, relative to what they are today.

Beginning in the 1970s, firms have experienced greater bargaining power vis-à-vis workers, resulting in downward pressure on real wages. The rise in economic insecurity with the expansion of temporary and contingent employment has affected men as well as women. Indeed, just as Guy Standing (1989) highlighted the “feminization of labor” in developing countries, with men’s jobs looking more like women’s jobs in wages, security, and social protection, this trend has extended to developed countries as well. The downward harmonization of labor conditions is an important gender dynamic, with substantial effects on gender identities and relations, especially due to the effect on norms of masculinity. These trends have been exacerbated by the nature of the 2008 crisis, which in most developed countries, led to displacement of male workers first (from manufacturing and construction jobs), disrupting the social construction of men’s economic roles.

The changes in employment and labor markets we have noted were accompanied by growing financialization of these economies. Financialization can be defined as the increase in the quantity, velocity, and complexity of financial transactions in the global economy; the expansion of financial motives in the operations of the economy; and the expanded role and power of financial interests. Opportunities to realize short-run returns through financial investments have trumped investments in fixed capital that allow firms to expand output in the medium to long run. Moreover, increased risk has accompanied the process of globalization. This is due to volatility in exchange rates and financial markets resulting from financial liberalization, making physical investment in new factories and equipment less attractive (Engelbert Stockhammer 2010).

Financialization has triggered a shift toward short-termism in the productive sector accompani...