The Feminist Political Economy of the Rent-Seeking Society: An Investigation of Gender Inequality and Economic Growth

Endogenous growth theorists argue that certain equity-enhancing social institutions enhance growth. Despite the centrality of inequality in these approaches, there is no sense in which economic actors exercise power or collective action to create and maintain social norms and rules that are personally advantageous but socially costly. This despite the work of neoclassical economists on rent-seeking, which posits that efforts to claim unearned revenues can pose significant costs for growth. The question of the impact of gender equity on economic growth is an instructive context for understanding these contradictions. Even though gender practices are inherently about the exercise of power, that they have become a feature of the neoclassical growth literature alights on obvious tensions in the neoclassical institutionalist paradigm. By incorporating insights from both the rent-seeking and feminist economics literatures, we will present analternative explanation of why gender hierarchies persist despite their obvious economic costs.