Suchergebnisse

Introduction : economic policies and human rights obligations /Radhika Balakrishnan and Diane Elson --Fiscal and monetary policy and the right to work : Mexico /Kristina Pirker and Sarah Gammage --Human rights dimensions of fiscal and monetary policies : United States /Radhika Balakrishnan and James Heintz --Human rights and public expenditure in Mexico /Daniela Ramírez Camacho --Human rights and public expenditure in the USA /Nursel Aydiner-Avsar and Diane Elson --Taxation and economic and social rights in Mexico /Lourdes Colinas and Roberto Constantino --Taxation and economic and social rights in the USA /Radhika Balakrishnan --Trade policy and human rights : Mexico /Alberto Serdan-Rosales and Carlos Salas --Trade policy and human rights obligations of the USA : NAFTA /Nursel Aydiner-Avsar and Diane Elson --Regulation : pension reform and human rights in Mexico /Gabriel Lara Salazar --Regulation : pension reform and human rights in the USA /Radhika Balakrishnan.

This paper sets out a framework for understanding the impacts of the financial crisis and its aftermath that is based on the idea of three interacting spheres: finance, production and reproduction. All of these spheres are gendered and globalised. The gendered impact of the current crisis is discussed in terms of the impact on unemployment, employment protection and security, public sector services, social security benefits, pensions, and the real value of wages and living standards. Drawing on the analysis of the UK Women's Budget Group, the paper demonstrates that the biggest falls in disposable income as the result of austerity policies by the Conservative-led government since 2010 have been borne by the most vulnerable women—lone mothers, single women pensioners and single women without children. Working-age couples without children have been least affected. The paper then goes on to discuss what an alternative economic strategy, based on feminist political economy, might look like. It utilises the notion of the 'reproductive bargain', first developed to understand the transition in Cuba in the 1990s. It sets out a possible feminist economic strategy that insists on the incorporation of reproductive and care work into the analysis of alternative economic policies and links employment, wages and social security payments to public provisioning of trans-generational reproductive services. It suggests feasible strategies to finance the proposed Plan F—a feminist economic strategy.

In the model sketched here, firms are self-managed and dependent on an office for controlling public property. They are self-financed, and may obtain funding from the office, subject to interest. They are connected to public information networks, financed through tax, which suplly price and wages committees with the information usually withdrawn by private markets. The role of these committees is to set standards. For the production goods market, the standards include variable margin rates, according to the grnidelines of the plan. The standards are not compulsory, and are meant to be used as a reference by buyers. For consumer goods, consumer committees financed through tay inform households on the conditions of production of the commidities and their impact on the environment, which allows consumers to intervene on the conception of new commodities. The work market is also controlled by standards set on the basis of the information collected by committees, which are also empowered to lay down rules. Such democratic institutions achieve a socialisation of the market, a better micro-economic fit, and a more conscious control of the economy.