Description
Across a series of recent crises, macroeconomics has emerged as a key site of contest and intervention. The increased power of Central Banks, along with an expectation of their intervention in economic and ecological crises has led to the development of crisis macroeconomics – exemplified by the normalisation of so-called unconventional monetary policy. While the political and economic consequences of this trend have been well studied, there remains a significant lack of understanding of both the gendered nature of this type of governance, and its gendered consequences. This paper offers a starting point for such an analysis, through a focus on the gendered nature of inflation. Building on and updating Diane Elson’s work that identified an ‘anti-inflationary bias’ as a key pillar of male-biased macroeconomics (1991), this paper explores how inflation interacts with gendered structures of the economy. The paper combines an analysis of the gendered distributional consequences of inflation – driven by gendered inequalities in both income and wealth – with an analysis of how inflation interacts with the non-monetary economy. By showing how inflation shapes social reproduction, this paper shows how the burdens of both inflation and deflation are distributed in gendered ways, further demonstrating the need for a transformative macroeconomics.
