Visible Hands – Invisible Women: Garment Production in Turkey

Abstract

The economic liberalization policies that started in the early 1980s marked a turn in Turkey's growth strategy by shifting it from import substitution to export orientation. Since then, the garment industry has been one of the top exporters, drawing on women as the main suppliers of informal labor for the industry through subcontracted and home-based piecework. Based on fieldwork, this paper examines the gender inequalities that underlie the export success of the garment industry, in which the organization of production and workplace relations embed and reproduce gender ideology and norms. Women's engagement in garment production is ensured through the articulation of women's subordinate position with the social organization of garment production and the mobilization of kinship relations. The continued expansion of garment exports and the ongoing informalization of nonagricultural employment, according to official estimates, suggest that these arrangements are becoming more extensive over time.     

Do young women trade jobs for marriage? A skeptical view

This paper takes a skeptical view of the theory that the slight decline in young women's labor-force participation from 1985 to 1990 can be explained by the fact that there are fewer women now in their early twenties than there are men in their late twenties so that women currently have more bargaining power in the marriage market than men do.The paper argues that the assumption behind this theory, that for women marriage and employment are substitutes, is outmoded. It also contends that the theory leaves out the importance of full-time schooling as an activity alternative to employment and that in fact the increase in full-time schooling among young women has been much greater than the slight decrease in their labor-force participation.Several questions are raised about the statistical test of the theory and also about the reasons why the Wall Street Journal ran a front-page article on the slight decline in young women's labor-force participation and featured the marriage market theory as an explanation for this purported new trend.     

From Foster Mothers to Child Care Centers: A History of Working Mothers and Child Care in Sweden

The Swedish welfare state is usually considered "woman friendly." It treats mothers, including single mothers, as workers and offers them high quality public child care. Feminist typologies often use paid work as the lens through which to look at welfare states. Jane Jenson, however, proposes that we think seriously about care in typologies of welfare states. The aim of this article is to take the child care arrangements of working mothers seriously and the empirical concern is historical. While most people believe that the expansion of public child care in Sweden enabled mothers to become workers, it could also be argued- looking through the lens of care- that new public policies enabled women workers to become caregivers.     

On the historical roots of women's empowerment across Italian provinces: religion or family culture?

Why do women's economic decision-making and political empowerment vary so widely? What are the main potential determinants of such variations? Over a cross-section of Italian provincial data, we analyze the association between two specific facets of women's empowerment, the percentage of women holding office in local political bodies and the percentage of women in high-ranking jobs, and the religious and cultural conditions which facilitate or hinder women's inclusion. Our hypothesis is that culture, in particular those values embodied by religious culture, plays a central role in shaping norms and beliefs about the role and involvement of women in society. Moreover we suggest that these cultural norms are inherited from the past and therefore have a high degree of inertia. Both OLS and IV results indicate that our measures of women's empowerment are strongly associated with religious culture, as proxied by religious marriages. These results are robust and consistent across specifications.     

GLOBALIZATION AND WOMEN'S PAID WORK: EXPANDING FREEDOM?

In Development as Freedom , Amartya Sen takes expanding freedom to be the primary end and the principal means of development. I discuss his emphasis on women's agency as central to development theory and practice and the strategies he advocates for enhancing it. Recent work in feminist economics and postcolonial studies tests Sen's complex account of freedom. Further levels of complexity need to be added when we examine how global forces of power interact with local systems of oppression in ways that often limit women's freedom. This argument rests on an analysis of how globalization affects a domain of freedom that is a central concern for Sen, that of increasing women's freedom to work outside the home as a way of strengthening their agency. Attending to elements missing in Sen's account will enhance freedom in women's lives.     

Reconsidering The “Firstmale-Breadwinner Economy”: Women's Labor Force Participation in the Netherlands, 1600–1900

Abstract

This contribution provides methods for estimating developments in women's labor force participation (LFP) in the Netherlands, for both preindustrial and industrializing eras. It explains long-term developments in Dutch LFP and concludes that the existing image of Dutch women's historically low participation in the labor market should be reconsidered. Contrary to what many economic historians have supposed, Dutch women's LFP was not lower, and was perhaps even higher, than elsewhere in the pre-1800 period. As in other Western European countries, the decline of (married) Dutch women's LFP only started in the nineteenth century, though it then probably declined faster than elsewhere. Thus, this study concludes that the Netherlands did not constitute the “first male-breadwinner economy,” as historians and economists have suggested. Scrutinizing the nineteenth-century data in more detail suggests that a complex of demographic, socioeconomic, and cultural changes resulted in this sharp decline of Dutch women's crude activity rates.     

Resilience and Dynamism of Embedded Financial Transactions in Cameroon

Following the recent financial crisis, institutional economists have issued a “call” for institutionalist research on alternative financial systems. While suggestions have been forthcoming, (for example, in Volume 48, Issue 4 of the Journal of Economic Issues), most have centered on national-level innovations in advanced capitalist countries, prompting further calls for “community” and individual level anti-capitalist financial relations. With this article, we respond to such calls. We show how networks of finance in Cameroon bridge the formal/informal dualisms in lending/savings activities. We demonstrate that any debates about whether to formalize informal financial institutions or leave them alone weaken in Cameroon because, through networks, people access both formal and informal financial institutions for different purposes and at various stages in the life of these institutions. This dynamism explains why, in spite of the growth of money markets in Cameroon, informal financial institutions have not disappeared, nor declined. In fact, they have expanded, contrary to predictions in existing new institutional economics research. While informal institutions have evolved, they have not necessarily become formal banks, microfinance, or stock markets. Rather, the informal financial institutions have adopted and adapted in terms of both lending and saving practices in a country where growing formal financialization has become the norm. Our findings challenge neoclassical and new institutional economics theories about money, credit, and the actors in the money market.