Luiza Nassif Pires
Luiza Nassif Pires is an Assistant Professor at the institute of economics at University of Campinas (IE-Unicamp) and the director of the research center on macroeconomics of inequalities (Made) at FEA/USP. She is a research associate in the Gender Equality and Economics program at the Levy Economics Institute at Bard College, where she lectured in the graduate programs in Economic Theory and Public Policy. She will be serving as a leader co-chair on the “Fighting inequalities, poverty, and hunger” task force at the T20 during Brazil’s presidency of G20 (T20 is a G20 engagement group that brings together think tanks). She is also a representative in the Steering Committee of the Union for Radical Political Economy (URPE) and a member of the International Association for Feminist Economics (IAFFE).
She holds a Ph.D. in Economics from The New School for Social Research and a master’s in Economics from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ). Her main research topics are feminist economics, intersectional political economy, care economics, and social reproduction theory and her main research methods are input-output models and microeconometrics.
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Luiza Nassif Pires is an Assistant Professor at the institute of economics at University of Campinas (IE-Unicamp) and the director of the research center on macroeconomics of inequalities (Made) at FEA/USP. She is a research associate in the Gender Equality and Economics program at the Levy Economics Institute at Bard College, where she lectured in the graduate programs in Economic Theory and Public Policy. She will be serving as a leader co-chair on the “Fighting inequalities, poverty, and hunger” task force at the T20 during Brazil’s presidency of G20 (T20 is a G20 engagement group that brings together think tanks). She is also a representative in the Steering Committee of the Union for Radical Political Economy (URPE) and a member of the International Association for Feminist Economics (IAFFE).
She holds a Ph.D. in Economics from The New School for Social Research and a master’s in Economics from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ). Her main research topics are feminist economics, intersectional political economy, care economics, and social reproduction theory and her main research methods are input-output models and microeconometrics.
In their own words…
IEA – Can you tell us a little bit about your life story, what got you interested in economics, and how you decided to pursue an academic career?
Luiza – I became an economist by pure chance and stayed in an academic career by inertia. Growing up, my parents did not have college degrees (my dad got one when I was already in college), so there was no pressure or expectations regarding what I would study. I started university in the applied math department. After one semester of math courses, I took a semester of communication courses and realized that I wanted to study something that required a mix of mathematical and humanities skills. I began the economics degree simply because there was an open spot to transfer from my degree in Math to economics within the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. At that point, I did not feel any connection to the field yet.
I was not especially thrilled by classes, but I joined the Industry and commerce research group (GIC) at UFRJ as a research assistant in my second semester. From the very beginning, research was something very exciting for me and a reason for me to stay in academia. Still, I had doubts about economics as a field. My involvement with GIC was essential for me to pursue a master’s degree and continue my research with them. There, I was able to research on topics of political relevance for Brazil, which was crucial for me to decide to stay in Economics and to pursue a Ph.D. Moreover, I know understand how the structuralist development framework, the methodological basis for my research then, was important for me to feel connected to economics as a discipline. It was only much later that I was able to see that most economic theories we are exposed to do not allow us to interpret economic phenomena from our lived experiences. Latin American development theory was the exception for me then.
Having felt alienated by most of the theories I studied, I considered giving up on economics quite a few times throughout my trajectory, mostly during my Ph.D. It was only when I got in contact with feminist economics that I finally saw myself as an economist, with an academic purpose that felt worth pursuing. In methodological terms, the study of feminist economics felt very similar to the study of development to me. Today, I am able to bring those together into my research. It is then my interaction with some key people, such as professors and researchers at GIC, and scholars from the International Association for Feminist Economics (IAFFE), that kept me going.
IEA – In your recent work you study a bidirectional relationship between inequality and Covid-19 crisis. You find that while cash relief policies helped neutralize short-term wage disparities, it has not neutralized the cost of multi-dimensional structural inequalities on death tolls in Brazil. Can you briefly summarize your findings? What made you interested in this topic?
Luiza – I think everyone had a particular way of panicking during the pandemic. My biggest worry in February 2020, while I was living in Brooklyn, NY, was that once the virus spread in the US, it would disproportionately hit racialized communities, and it seemed that no one was doing anything to prevent that. The CDC’s “500 Cities Project” is a fascinating initiative that produced data on chronic diseases by census tract, available on their website through a map view. I found myself compulsively exploring the 500 Cities Project map, zooming into neighborhoods in Brooklyn and Queens that I knew were predominantly immigrant or black, identifying clear patterns.
For example, this is the data from 2017, if you zoom into Queens, NY, the Corona neighbourhood, which later became the hardest-hit, immediately stands out on the map. It was very frustrating to see early statistics that clearly pointed to a correlation between comorbidities and COVID-related deaths, along with that map. This was public data from the CDC, not being used to prevent the impending crisis.
I decided to turn that fear into research, and colleagues at the Levy institute and I started working on a paper using the 500 cities project data and ACS data to investigate the correlation between the prevalence of comorbidities and the percentage of racialized population, as well as the poverty rate by census tract. In that paper, we found very significant results indicating that mortality rates were likely be higher among racialized people and poor people in the US, which turned out to be true. We also showed that the population more likely to be hardest hit was also less likely to have health insurance coverage.
After publishing that policy brief, Laura Carvalho suggested we did a similar study for Brazil. Our worry was that in global south countries, marked by acute inequality, the results that were found for the US, at that point already corroborated by observed death rates, would be even more devastating and have more profound economic implications.
We then adapted the methodology applied to the US paper to the country’s characteristics and to the data available, showing the correlation between social vulnerabilities and death tolls. We also argued for the importance of economic relief packages to attenuate the economic impacts of the pandemic. Another co-authored paper extended the discussion of the importance of the continuation of the Brazilian emergency transfer program to mitigate racial and gender negative impacts of COVID on poverty as well.
IEA – Another paper you worked on studies the impact of childcare expansion in Mexico. Can you briefly summarize your findings?
Luiza – That paper was the result of a project at the Levy Economics Institute, together with Thomas Masterson, Ajit Zacharias, Rania Antonopoulos, and Fernando Rios-Avila. It is part of a line of research they have developed alongside other scholars such as İpek Ilkkaracan and Kijong Kim, in response to an urgent need to address the care crisis. The main purpose is to show that investing in care infrastructure serves two purposes simultaneously – providing access to care and increasing employment opportunity for women. Nonetheless, the research also highlights an intrinsic contradiction of our system; such policies won’t necessarily alleviate time poverty for women. Instead, they simply substitute the time spent on some unpaid work with time spent on paid work, without decreasing the hours spent on other unpaid work activities.
In the case of Mexico, our research shows that expanding early childhood education has different effects on men and women. It appears that women, especially those in poorer households, benefit more from the availability of early childhood education services. This is because it allows them to be more flexible in managing both unpaid household work and paid jobs while their children are in childcare.
However, there’s a downside for women. If there isn’t a significant decrease in their household production responsibilities, the overall time pressure on women increases. In fact, the time poverty rate for women who have jobs and live in households with young children nearly tripled compared to the situation before the expansion of early childhood education, according to our data analysis for Mexico.
Similar models to the one used in the Mexico project have been used in other research by levy scholars in Turkey and the U.S. I have also been personally involved in a project with the Levy team applied to Jordan and am currently working on expanding this analysis for Brazil.
IEA – Why is this research relevant today?
Luiza – I don’t think I need to convince anyone of the urgency of addressing systemic problems such as gender inequality. So, I will state why I believe that a specific line of research is relevant today. Feminist economists are forced to find a way to resolve a two-dimensional problem and to take together into consideration growth and gender equality. While there are many instances in which these two goals align, there are also situations where there will be a contradiction between them. I believe it is the role of feminist economists to highlight those contradictions, but it is also essential to provide policy measures that actually achieve growth and gender equality at the same time.
Investing in care infrastructure is one of such virtuous policies. The main advantage of the models employed on the research described above is that they speaks a language that is convincing to policy makers. I believe that for us to be able to advance policies that actually walk that fine line and bring about gender equality and growth, we need to highlight the economic advantages to policy makers. You do not go to your mainstream finance minister and talk to him about the importance of women having access to childcare; you talk to him about how much bigger of an impact public spending on childcare infrastructure has on employment when compared to public spending on physical infrastructure.
IEA – Why is it important for economic research to be racially diverse and inclusive?
Luiza – First of all, I believe we have an obligation as society to end all kinds of discrimination, and in a country like Brazil, this starts with fighting against racism. I don’t think I need to convince people that this is urgent. To achieve that, we need to extensively study the ways in which our economic system racializes people and exploits them.
Besides being a moral obligation and a necessary agenda of anyone committed to social justice, economic research benefits significantly from racial diversity and inclusivity, as it allows for a more comprehensive understanding of economic dynamics. The importance of racial diversity in economic research lies in its ability to uncover neglected perspectives, resist discrimination, enhance representativeness, challenge hegemonic narratives, and contribute to building a comprehensive mosaic of knowledge. Inclusive research ensures that experiences and viewpoints of different racial groups are considered, leading to more accurate and applicable theories that reflect the realities faced by diverse communities. Ultimately, embracing diversity in economic research helps break down biases, fosters equitable representation, and contributes to a more holistic and accurate understanding of economic phenomena.