Unequal Burden: Economic Crises, Persistent Poverty, And Women's Work

The debt crisis and global economic changes of the past decade have caused Third World nations to restructure economic policies and the labor market and to liberalize their economies. This text uses country-based studies to analyze the consequences of economic crisis in terms of changing state practices, household and family organization, patterns of resource allocation, and womens work. Contributors examine not only patterns of response to changing economic circumstances but also strategies of choice. The debt crisis and global economic changes of the past decade have caused Third World nations to restructure economic policies, community resources, the labor market, and intrahousehold divisions of labor. These changes have swelled the ranks of the unemployed, the poor, and the malnourished. Women, in particular, have been affected negatively by processes of structural adjustment because they represent a disproportionate share of the worlds poor, are increasingly represented among low-wage workers, and are forced to balance wage work with subsistence and domestic production in meeting household needs.Using country-based studies, this text offers new perspectives on the consequences of economic crisis in terms of changing state practices and household and family organization, patterns of resource allocation, and womens work. Throughout, the contributors raise two critical questions: Fo r what segments of the population do austerity measures mean more limited access to food, social services, and unemployment? For whom do they create increased access to credit and new incentives to expand production, thus increasing accumulation and profit-making opportunities? The field-based investigations of crisis and poverty also emphasize the salience of gender relations and embrace a view of the household and its diverse organizational forms and relations as a contradictory institution in which conflict and cooperation create the complex dynamic of daily survival.