The Care Economy

The book that started the field. Waring, a former New Zealand MP, showed that the United Nations System of National Accounts simply does not count unpaid household and care work — so a tree felled has value but a child raised has none. A founding text of feminist economics and the intellectual root of every time-use survey that followed.

Folbre's accessible classic argues that care — the work of raising children, tending the sick and old — is the invisible heart that markets depend on but cannot produce, and that leaving it to unpaid family labour quietly subsidises the whole economy. The clearest single statement of why care is an economic question, not a private one.

Introduces the influential "care diamond" — the idea that care is provided across four institutions: the family, the state, the market, and the non-profit sector — and that development policy decides, often invisibly, how the burden is split between them. Essential conceptual scaffolding for everything that follows.

India's first nationwide Time Use Survey in nearly two decades, and the single most important data source on the country's care economy. It found Indian women spend several hours a day on unpaid domestic and caregiving work while men spend a fraction of that — quantifying a gap that policy had long ignored. Read the report's tables on participation rates and time spent by sex.

The most comprehensive global accounting of care work, paid and unpaid. It estimates that unpaid care work, if valued, would be equivalent to a large share of global GDP, and that women perform the overwhelming majority of it. The reference report for the scale of the care economy and the case for investing in it.

The report that took the feminist-economics argument to Davos. Its headline — that the unpaid care work done by women and girls adds enormous value to the economy while being treated as free — reframed care as central to the inequality debate. Polemical and data-rich; pair it with the ILO numbers it draws on.

Elson's elegantly simple agenda: recognise unpaid care work as work (through measurement and acknowledgement), reduce the drudgery (through water, fuel, childcare infrastructure), and redistribute it — from women to men, and from households to the state and market. The framing now embedded in SDG target 5.4 and in care policy worldwide.

How the 3 Rs became official global policy: SDG 5.4 commits governments to recognise and value unpaid care and domestic work through public services, infrastructure, and the promotion of shared responsibility within the household. The bridge from feminist theory to government targets.

The economic-policy case: public investment in care services (childcare, eldercare, paid leave) is not just a cost but an employment engine that frees women's time, creates decent jobs, and pays back through higher participation and tax revenue. The argument that turns care from a welfare line item into infrastructure.

One of India's foremost development economists on why the unpaid care burden keeps women out of the paid workforce, how austerity shifts costs onto households (and so onto women), and what a feminist macroeconomics would look like. The macro context behind India's time-use numbers.

A strand of Indian scholarship linking the care burden to "time poverty": where water, fuel, sanitation, and childcare are scarce, women's unpaid hours balloon and their paid options shrink. It connects the care economy directly to the basic-infrastructure agenda — and to the "reduce" in the 3 Rs.

Our companion Deep Dive on why so few Indian women work for pay — and why participation fell even as the economy grew. The unpaid care burden is one of the leading explanations; read the two lists together for the full picture of how care shapes women's economic lives.

The pandemic's natural experiment. As schools and services closed, the unpaid care load surged — and fell disproportionately on women, even in dual-earner households. The clearest evidence that care is the economy's shock absorber, and that women absorb the shock. A turning point in mainstream attention to the issue.

A rigorous edited volume on the paid care sector — childcare and eldercare workers, nurses, aides — and the "care penalty": why care jobs are systematically underpaid precisely because the work is associated with love and women. Bridges the unpaid and paid halves of the care economy, and points to where decent-work policy must go.