1.
Conference On Measurement Of
Well Being and Development in
Africa
Imraan Valodia
University of Witwatersrand

2.
From a gender perspective, 2 concerns
that I want to highlight
• Unpaid Work
• Intra HH issues

3.
Unpaid work
• Fairly well established that we spend as much,
if not more, time on reproduction than we do
on production
• There is a gendered pattern to unpaid work
• GDP calculations continue to ignore unpaid
work

4.
% OF TIME USE SPEND BY GENDER
FOR SA

5.
It matters
• Under-investment in social services
– If Treasury is only seeing the market economy, we
are under-investing in social services
• Might we be making massive policy errors?
– Trade Liberalisation?

6.
Intra HH Issues
• Our GDP calculations do not pay significant
attention to intra HH gender issues
• Take, for example, VAT which is assumed to be
a “good” tax for conditions in Africa
• Might VAT place a heavy burden on women?
– VAT a tax on comsumption
• Women have higher propensity to consume
• Women disproportionately in low income groups with
higher propensity to consume

7.
• Grown and Valodia studied gender and tax
issues in 8 countries

8.
One policy experiment : Drop zero
rating of food in SA

9.
Figure 7. Simulation: VAT rating basic food
0
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
1 2 3 4 5
Quintile
Tax/Expshare(%)
Male-headed: food Male-headed: food without 0-rating
Female-headed: food Female-headed: food without 0-rating
Simulation: Vat rating 19 basic food items that are currently zero-rated.
Result: Zero-rating reduces incidence and regressivity substantially and
eliminates the gender bias.

10.
Summary
• From a gender perspective, GDP and well-
being measures remain inadequate
• Much innovation in Africa in the research
community over the last 20 years
– Many countries have time use surveys
• Very little traction in policymaking world