Care Economics: towards new direction of research
Care Economics: Towards new directions of research is a two-day workshop taking place on May 29-30 at the Sant’Anna School, jointly organised by the Young Scholars Initiative and the Institute of Economics. The workshop is articulated in three sessions, each tackling one of the core domains of care economics. National and international scholars will be invited to present their work.
The first session "Investing in care: employment, wages, and gender imbalance" deals with essential jobs and their relationship with the transformation of productive structures. Sectoral and occupational units of analysis will be considered to assess the importance of care activity both in terms of societal needs and economic relevance on employment and wage dynamics.
The second session “Reassessing the role of the welfare state: the interplay of care, time, and living standards” aims to reconsider national welfare state systems, according to both their transformative impact on distributive market outcomes and to how they relate to family settings and individual choice between waged and unwaged working time. This session explores the link between income and time use inequalities, which is gaining momentum due to the interplay of welfare state retrenchment, ageing population, and marketisation of care services.
The third session “Care and domestic work in historical perspective” investigates the role of care in historical perspective. It focuses on the subtle differences between paid and unpaid activities, market and domestic labour, intrahousehold allocation of work and care and its evolution over time. The importance of care and how to measure it in the economic history framework will be at the centre of this session.
The three sessions will be followed by a roundtable with title “Policy and politics of a gendered discourse”, where leading scholars and experts will discuss the main questions that arose during the workshop and advance proposals for future streams of research and policy interventions.
The event will be broadcasted on the Youtube channel of Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna: