Macroeconomic and Microeconomic Impacts of Improving Physical and Social Infrastructure

Thomas Masterson, Levy Economics Institute of Bard College

There is a lack of studies that directly investigate how infrastructure improvements affect unpaid work, e.g. the time spent on domestic services and care and on commuting to work. Our work fills this gap in the research by studying this issue in the context of Ghana and Tanzania utilizing the framework of the Levy Institute Measure of Time and Income Poverty. Our macroeconomic model with microsimulation allow us to investigate gendered economic processes and outcomes at the macroeconomic and microeconomic levels. It is a disaggregated and fully articulated macroeconomic model based on the social accounting matrices for Ghana and Tanzania, taking account of intersectoral linkages and external constraints, such as balance of payments, that are particularly important for many developing nations.