The gender division of labour between paid and unpaid work in the UK

Description

Use a semi structured interview process.

The project element should formulate and focus on a clearly defined economics research question that is well-grounded in the study materials, apply and explore economic theory learned in the module (Chapter 9, 4 &3 attached), with knowledge deepened through appropriate literature review apply primary-data collection and analysis; secondary data collection and analysis effectively integrate evidence and economic analysis in order to address a research question provide clear conclusions that address the research question.

The word limit for the project is 3800 words. This includes everything apart from references and appendices. Good projects tend to make significant use of appendices.

Please follow the project guide document and assignment task explained file (see attachment) for more details on requirements.

Attention: Please draw theories and Concept from Chapter 9, 3 and 4 files including other articles attached based on learnings from the module before applying other theories and concepts from other sources. Make sure the school modules are referenced accordingly based on the concepts and use Harvard reference style.

Chapter 9 Welfare economics and social choice

1 Introduction: social choice and welfare

The will of the people … is the only legitimate foundation of any

government, and to protect its free expression should be our first

object.

Thomas Jefferson, 1801 (Lipscomb and Bergh, 1905)

Politics is not the art of the possible. It consists in choosing

between the disastrous and the unpalatable.

J.K. Galbraith, 1962 (Galbraith, 1969)

Extraordinary as the power of Adam Smith’s ‘invisible hand’ may be, there are, as Chapter 8 noted, some things that the market mechanism cannot do well. While private choices in markets may lead to a Paretoefficient outcome, ethical principles are required if we are to choose between outcomes that distribute economic benefits differently between individuals. It is also difficult to see how you might indicate your preference for, say, an integrated and sustainable transport system by walking into a shop and buying some particular product.

Decisions such as distributional or major infrastructural choices require some form of decision making by, or for, collectivities of citizens (global, national or local). They are social choices rather than individual choices. They are typically large in scale relative to the collectivity in question, have major opportunity costs, and generate winners and losers. Examples of such choices include the design of national school curricula, the promotion of personal security, and the decision to bid to host the Olympic Games. They require government or collective action, and some consultation with the public may help to understand the will of the people (as Jefferson put it) and thereby to improve the outcomes. How to identify the best decision in such cases is the terrain of theories of social choice.

Social choice

Social choice is the study of criteria by which groups of individuals can make thebestchoice between alternative options.

Social choice theorists therefore operate on the boundaries between economic theory, politics and philosophy. Economists tend to address the ‘will of the people’ by starting from individual preferences and seeking some way of aggregating these to produce a societal preference. One natural approach is to use voting as an expression of democratic

choice, and social choice theorists consider the extent to which voting rules can produce satisfactory outcomes as we will see in Section 2. An alternative approach has a more technical or scientificfeel andinvolves assessing alternative policies in quantitative terms, using evidence, often from market activities, of people’s willingness to pay for different options. In Section 3 we will look at this approach, known as cost– benefit analysis, which is widely used by economists working for governments as a means of identifying the choice that produces the maximum social benefit.