## Women in Economics (edwards-women-in-economics)

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### Purple Economy — Ipek Ilkkaracan
- Concept: “purple economy” — making economies more sustainable through increased gender equality and investment in the social care infrastructure; term coined to complement the green economy.
- Motivation: personal experience of intensive unpaid caregiving while pursuing a career in economics; identified a disciplinary blind spot around unpaid care.
- Key empirical findings and claims:
  - Public spending on early childhood care services and preschool education can create three times more jobs than the same magnitude of public funds being allocated to the construction sector (Turkish context).
  - There are sixteen and a half billion hours of unpaid work performed every day around the globe in the domestic sphere (care activities, household production).
  - Shifting only half of that unpaid work to the paid sphere “would amount to hundreds of millions of new jobs.”
- Policy implication: Investing public funds in care services (early childhood care, preschool education) is a high job-creation strategy and central to addressing potential job losses from technology.

### Sectoral Indices and Local Data — Rose Ngugi
- Initiative: Kenya Institute for Public Policy Research and Analysis (KIPPRA) provides Kenya-centric sectoral indices to county governments.
- Purpose and use:
  - Indices gauge the impact and effectiveness of county-level policies and help counties focus attention on underperforming areas.
  - Indices measure real-life activities relevant to local communities, including the informal sector.
- Key statistics:
  - Informal sector employs 80 percent of the population in Kenya.
  - Indices are helping 47 counties build stronger local economies and support the national government’s bottom-up approach to economic transformation.
- Policy implication: Accurate, locally relevant data (sectoral indices) enable targeted support for micro and small enterprises—the “bedrock” of growth and decent job creation at the county level.

### Rethinking Social Protection — Marcela Eslava
- Diagnostic: Latin America’s core development problem is the combination of low income and high inequality, with large fractions of the workforce in informal jobs and not contributing to social security systems.
- Observations:
  - Survival entrepreneurs account for half of Latin America’s workers and would otherwise be eligible for social security benefits under the law.
  - Social security systems are “very dysfunctional” because a very large fraction of the population is not covered despite written law protections.
- Key policy proposals and principles:
  - Redesign social protection to protect people based on the risks they face rather than on how they make their living.
  - “Health care should kick in when you get sick, not when you get sick and you’re formally employed.”
  - Rethink financing of social protection: adopt a “whole new vision on taxes and contributions that governments raise” to fund risk-based coverage.

### Tobacco Economics and Public Health — Rumana Huque
- Context and prevalence:
  - The latest round of Global Adult Tobacco Surveys (2017) shows that 35.3 percent of people 15 years of age or older use tobacco products (Bangladesh and Southeast Asia context).
- Fiscal and health trade-offs:
  - Between 9 and 11 percent of all tax revenue in Bangladesh comes from the tobacco industry (National Board of Revenue).
  - Tobacco kills more than 160,000 Bangladeshis every year.
  - Taxes collected from tobacco products do not come close to covering the costs of treating tobacco-related illness (economic burden exceeds tax revenue from tobacco).
- Empirical evidence on exposure:
  - Study of 1,300 school-age children found that 95 percent had nicotine in their saliva, indicating exposure to secondhand smoke.
- Policy implication:
  - Bangladesh should rethink its tobacco tax structure; taxation is the most cost-effective way to discourage use of tobacco products.
  - Governments must balance short-term fiscal dependence on tobacco taxes against long-term public health gains and the need to find alternate sources of tax revenue.

*Writing by Bruce Edwards, based on reporting by Rhoda Metcalfe; visit www.imf.org/podcasts to hear interviews with all four economists.*

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_Source: https://www.imf.org/-/media/files/publications/fandd/article/2025/03/edwards-women-in-economics.pdf_