Government policies and families
Paper to the
Stuart
Birks
Palmerston North
Telephone: 06-350-5799 X2660
Email: k.s.birks@massey.ac.nz
Abstract
While some policies are specifically designed to achieve desired outcomes with respect to families, there are many other policies that also have an influence. These include policies in relation to such areas as education, employment, human rights and poverty.
Economics as a
discipline offers tools for analyzing the way people's behaviour
might change as their environment changes. In particular, people make choices
according to perceptions of the incentives and disincentives faced.
Consequently, policy changes can have both direct and indirect effects.
Initiatives in one area aimed at one set of objectives can have implications
for objectives elsewhere. This can result in unanticipated outcomes and the
failure of policies to achieve their desired ends.
This paper considers the wider policy scene, attempting to identify possible influences on families. It also speculates on individual behaviour given the incentives and disincentives arising as a result of government policy. In particular, it asks what would be realistic life-expectations for our young men and women.
JEL Classification
H31
Fiscal Policies and Behaviour of Households, I Health, Education and Welfare, J
Labour and Demographic Economics
Key words
Family, policy,
Government Policies
and Families
Stuart Birks,
1. Marriage and Signalling
People make decisions based on the information available. Some things, dress, behaviour, qualifications, possessions, send signals to others which can be used to assist in decision making. Bishop describes marriage as a signal to a partner and to others, and this can affect the behaviour of these people.[1] For example, marriage may signal some degree of exclusivity, which can reduce the risk of a partner being unfaithful or the opportunities for a partner to be unfaithful.
Scott takes this further to suggest that marriage, and a range of possible alternatives to marriage, may enable a person to signal to prospective partners the type of commitment they are prepared to make.[2] These signals are diluted if marriage, or other alternative relationships, change to allow easier, or more favourable, exit. It is then no longer so clear what signals a prospective partner is giving when showing willingness to enter into a relationship. This would deter those who are risk averse, or who want a relationship with heavy commitment and its associated risk of high penalties from relationship breakdown. This could lead to such people either reducing their investment (commitment), or avoiding marriage. It may encourage those who intend to make a relatively small investment (commitment).
Note that, while these ideas come from the marriage literature, we should be thinking about a range of relationships where one person’s behaviour depends in part on assumptions/expectations about the behaviour of a partner.
2. What Signals Are We Giving?
Much of the recent literature and parliamentary debate on relationship legislation is based on people’s first long-term relationship, and seems to assume that people only have one such relationship. This was particularly evident in discussion on disparities of future earnings. See, for example, Bridge[3], who called for equalizing post-separation outcomes.
A lot could be said about incentives and disincentives for repartnering, but I will concentrate on the perspective of young people looking forward.
2.1 Signals on marriage and relationships
2.1.1 Diversity of family types
The current government has put great emphasis on the “diversity of
family types”. In particular, recent legislation and discussion has been
directed at same-sex couples and parents. Are we getting an accurate picture of
families in
A Statistics New Zealand publication gives some household data.[4] Households are subdivided into family types. This means that there are no categories for families which are spread over more than one household. Data from the publication are given in the Appendix to this paper.
While there is much talk about a “diversity
of family types”, in 2001 same sex couples comprised approximately one percent
of all couples without children. Of couples with children, less than a third of
one percent are same sex couples. There are
approximately 2,200 dependent children
in these households. Not all of these children would have been born into an
existing same-sex relationship.
In comparison, in 2001 there were approximately 667,000 dependent children in opposite-sex couple households (from Table 14 of the publication). That does not mean that both members of each couple are parents of the children. Family types that include couples with children do not distinguish between parents and step-parents or other new partners of a parent. There is no family type that recognizes that some of these children have a parent living in a different household. These children may be spending time living in two households, but that is not recorded either.
In 2001 there were approximately 250,000 dependent children in sole parent households. Most of them have another parent somewhere, and they could be spending much of their time with that parent. There is no family type recognizing that relationship.
In summary, while there are
efforts to recognize the relatively small family types of same sex couples with
and without children, there is a marked failure to acknowledge a far more
common family type, that of children whose parents live apart.
2.1.2 Speed of transfer of assets under PRA
The Property Relationships Act did not just bring de facto couples under the same rules as married couples. For many couples, it reduced the time before which the rules would apply. Any married couple who cohabit before marriage would be subject to the full effect of the law three years after the start of cohabitation, not three years after marriage. Also, the law change reduced scope for recognition of unequal contributions in terms of bringing different wealth or earning power into the relationship. However, it did allow unequal splitting of assets in recognition of the effects of the division of responsibilities in the relationship, favouring in particular “career sacrifices” to care for children.
2.1.3 Lack of interest in men having custody, rejection of shared
custody
There are numerous indications of lack of support for fathers who wish to play an active role as parents. This was clearly demonstrated in the defeat of the Shared Parenting Bill at its first reading. There are also indirect indications as shown in the following two examples:
a) Statistics on custody
The following is a parliamentary Question for Written Answer:
355 (2004). Rodney Hide to the Minister for
Courts (
What statistics on the awarding of custody does the Family Court keep?
Hon Rick Barker (Minister for Courts) replied: There are no statistics
kept of custody awards. As each case is determined on its merits, the Family
Court has no interest in the numbers of cases where orders are made in favour of either the applicant or the respondent.
Presumably every court case is determined on its merits. Does the Minister believe there is no reason for keeping records of prosecution and convictions?
b) A view on fathers by a lecturer in social work:
The
following is taken from "Women, Divorce and Social Policy" by Mary
Nash, chapter 10 in Celia Briar, Robyn Munford and Mary Nash (1992) Superwoman
where are you? Social Policy and Women's Experience. Palmerston
North:
Feminists have consistently argued that it is time fathers took a greater share of the physical and emotional nurturing which women have traditionally done. By this, they refer to the mundane, but intimate things like changing nappies, feeding small children, finding time to listen to children's questions or stories, anticipating possible dangers or desires. There are more fathers now who have an interest in this way of relating to their children. This is to be encouraged. It should not be confused however, with the growing Fathers' Rights movement.
Against the backdrop of ever-increasing divorce rates and the steady rise of de facto and step-family arrangements, the Fathers' Rights movement has begun to lobby for the patriarchy ... It is argued that the Fathers' Rights movement shares a common purpose with the ideology of new right advocates. Both want to see the father restored to his role as the breadwinning head of a family where there is a wife to stay home and care for the household. Fathers' Rights calls for legal rights over children, if fathers can realistically be expected to be willing to pay maintenance. Joint custody, where this is seen as the answer, can result in the father regaining power over his ex-wife, with rights towards his child, but few of the daily ties and responsibilities that she experiences.
There are some real dilemmas here - one can see how easily women who resist access to their children by the father can quickly appear unreasonable and intransigent ... Women who leave their partner or spouse and have to apply to the State for support are costly. If, on the other hand, they work, they represent a lost resource to the State, which is busy dismantling welfare services and thrusting its responsibilities onto the community. We should, however, listen carefully to the woman who wishes to restrict the father's access to her child. She may have very good reason, even though it may be difficult for outsiders to detect. The frighteningly high statistics concerning rape, sexual abuse, violence in the home mean that there must be many women who, when they express dissatisfaction with their marriage, and disappointment with their relationships with men, do so for very real reasons. [Page 213]
To me, it seems as if Nash is arguing that men are wanted for the "mundane" childcare tasks, but if they want more of a say than that then they are after patriarchal power and control. A woman's wish to restrict a father's access to his children should be taken seriously, but a man's wish for involvement should be treated with suspicion.
2.1.4 Anti-marriage views
There is a highly publicised book by Marilyn Waring, Counting for Nothing: What Men Value and What Women are Worth[5]. The front cover of the 1989 reprint has a quote from Robin Morgan, who describes the book as, “The definitive feminist economic analysis”. On the web, Morgan is described as a feminist activist. I found some of her quotes.[6] They include:
·
Sexism is NOT the fault of
women -- kill your fathers, not your mothers.
·
We can't destroy the
inequities between men and women until we destroy marriage.
·
[A] legitimate revolution
must be led by, made by those who have been most oppressed: black, brown,
yellow, red, and white women — with men relating to that the best they can.
· I feel that "man-hating" is an honorable and viable political act, that the oppressed have a right to class-hatred against the class that is oppressing them.
What does she mean when she uses the word “definitive”? Is it that the book supports her objectives, and does a recommendation from someone holding such views indicate content of a high academic standard.
In the book, Waring includes questions from a Canadian census, indicating responses that women could make. She suggests (p.100) they claim 96 hours unpaid work in a week, or nearly 14 hours a day. She is referring to a full-time homemaker/housewife. As the response to give to the question “What kind of work were you doing?” she suggests “slave labour” (p.103). A 1993 Statistics Canada publication, A Portrait of Families in Canada, reported that Canadian women with children under 5 whose main work was keeping house spent an average of 8.5 hours per day on unpaid work, giving a total of 59.5 hours a week. We could therefore question both the facts and the sentiments conveyed.
In addition to these points, we could also add uncertainty about future changes in the law and its interpretation, and a persistent refusal to acknowledge mutual partner violence and violence by women, as well as women’s maltreatment of children. These latter suggest that laws are being developed and applied in an atmosphere of misinformation. Yet another issue currently receiving media attention is misattribution of paternity, which has been very roughly estimated to run at about 10 percent of all attributions. Despite this, men wanting DNA tests for paternity face significant obstacles, as highlighted by the recent case of Gordon Dowler. It took him 21 years to determine that he was not the father of the child for whom he had been required to pay child support.[7]
To summarise, relationships are less stable than in the past, and are therefore of higher risk, making it difficult to take a long-term perspective. Risks are particularly high for those who have accumulated assets or have built up their earning power, or, for men at least, who would not want disrupted relationships with their children. Current policy signals give no guarantee of future rules that would apply also to commitments made in the present. In other words, the current environment discourages the sort of behaviour that we might consider most desirable for society, and penalizes those acting in a beneficial way for society. We have perverse incentives.
2.2 Signals on individuality
Other policies focus on individual behaviour. Benefit structures such as the DPB may immediately spring to mind, but policies in relation to education and employment are also important.
2.2.1 Action Plan for
NZ Women
The following is taken from The Action Plan for New Zealand Women:
The
·
ECONOMIC SUSTAINABILITY, to
improve women’s economic independence and ability to contribute to the
·
WORK-LIFE BALANCE, to help
women achieve a greater balance between paid work and life outside work
·
WELL-BEING, to improve
health and social outcomes for women.[8]
An individualistic perspective is clearly taken with the first area, economic independence for women. It does also lead us to question the intention of legislation on relationship property. If the aim is to promote independence for people, why have such large and rapid transfers from one person to another at the end of a relationship? Why is there so little consideration of differentials in income, wealth and earning power at the start of a relationship, when there is so much focus on differentials at the end?
Men could justifiable feel left out by the Action Plan. The second area is clearly stated as being for the benefit of women. Even though legislation is for paid parental leave, it is primarily for women, and women are the gatekeepers. The Explanatory Note to the Employment Relations (Flexible Working Hours) Amendment Bill even refers to it as maternity leave:
"Greater opportunities for flexible working will enable some parents who would otherwise leave the labour market to remain in employment at the end of maternity leave."[9]
The Action Plan was a base document for the National Women’s Convention at the beginning of June.
2.2.2 Work and the gender employment and pay gap
In Asymmetric Information last year I described the government’s objectives of equality of outcomes for men and women.[10] This involves treating men and women as individuals, rather than members of cooperative units such a families which can give opportunities for specialization. The goal of equality of outcomes for women and men is puzzling for other reasons also. Although feminism has claimed to involve giving women choices, “girls can do anything”, a goal of equal outcomes suggests that women should be making the same choices as men, even though it has also been suggested by the same people that men are “behind” women in terms of sorting out a vision for the future.
3. The Policymaking Environment
3.1 An example – the
National Women’s Convention
Earlier this month I had the dubious pleasure of being on a National
Radio panel discussion on gender issues. It was broadcast at the time of the
National Women’s Convention in
Former Women's Affairs Minister Margaret
Shields, who is convening a national women's convention in Wellington next
weekend, says the organisers initially planned a
joint conference of men and women to celebrate 30 years of social change since
a big United Women's Convention in 1975.
"But men really weren't ready," she says. "On the whole, men
haven't had to be half as reflective as women, because they were kind of in
charge.
"I would really welcome similar meetings for men to look at what they see
as their vision for society, so we can get further ahead."[11]
The women participants on the radio discussion were Judy McGregor, Human Rights Commissioner for EEO, and Shenagh Gleisner, Chief Executive of the Ministry of Women’s Affairs. They expressed a similar view. I found it hard to accept. The position involves an assumption that it is acceptable for women to develop their view of the future, and that, quite independently, men should do the same. This is unrealistic if men’s and women’s lives and aspirations are interlinked. Nor is it realistic unless there are universal “women’s visions” and “men’s visions”. There is an additional suggestion here that men are lagging behind women. Instead, there may be a problem with the vision these particular women have of future society, due to their being out of touch with, and failing to take account of, the possible views of other members of society.
According to a media release dated
3.2 Broader criteria
Of even greater concern from an economics perspective is the apparent failure to consider some of the fundamentals of policymaking when developing these policies that have a significant impact on families. What are these fundamentals that are being overlooked?
3.2.1 Three basic
questions
I suggest to my students that they pose the following three
questions when asking if intervention, or a change in intervention, should be
undertaken:
1)
Is there something wrong with
the non-intervention/status quo situation?
If no, there are no grounds for intervention.
If yes:
2)
Are there policy options that
can improve on non-intervention?
Note that policies affect the future, not the
present, so there has to be an identifiable problem affecting the future, not
just the affecting the present.
If there are suitable policies:
3) Will available policies be used to meet
these objectives, or for other purposes? (i.e. can
decision makers be trusted to use the policies appropriately?)
A standard economic approach to question 1 would be to ask if there
is market failure. We should also note that systems are more flexible in the
long run, and they may self-correct given time for people to learn and adapt,
so a short-term failure may not justify slow-impact or long-term interventions.
3.2.2 Influencing the
future
Much of the current debate on gender-political issues is based on data about existing or past circumstances. The impact of policies is not felt immediately. When considering what policies to change or introduce, we need to be thinking of the future, and so much current debate is addressing the wrong questions. For example, even if we are concerned about the proportion of women in senior positions, we should not be asking if the current proportion is too low. We should be asking what the proportion would be in the future on current policy settings. It can take years for the gender imbalance among tertiary students to work its way through to affect the numbers in senior employment positions in tertiary education and elsewhere. When it does, it could then result in an imbalance in the opposite direction. Perhaps we should be doing something about this issue now.
Speed of change can also be a problem. From page 2 of the National Women’s Convention Newsletter No.5, April 2005[13]:
In 2001, the Westpac Executive Team was 100%
male and females made up just 11.1% of senior managers. Today women hold 33% of
senior jobs with three women on the Executive Team, including the CEO.
In other words, if there has been no change in the total number of senior positions, and all appointments were of women, then there was a 22% turnover in four years. Otherwise the turnover may have been even greater, or there could have been a very rapid expansion of senior management. Some might consider this to be indicative of an unstable organization or top-heavy growth, and possibly reflecting overly-rapid advancement of women to senior positions (and perhaps arrested advancement of young men).
A recent AUS survey of
There may also be currently identifiable future problems with general practitioners.
Women
GPs have traditionally worked fewer hours than male GPs and fewer on call
hours…The 2000 MCNZ Medical Workforce Report identified that women GPs work
an average of 33 hours/wk compared to 48 for male GPs.20
If the proportion of female GPs continues to increase and the pattern
of women working fewer hours persists, this will mean that more GPs will be
required to maintain the same level of service (or male GPs will need to work
an increasing number of hours to cover, which anecdotal evidence suggests
is occurring currently.)
On the same page, a table showed that the proportion of GPs who were
female increased from 27.0% in 1992 to 37.4% in 2002, and, “of the 2003 class of doctors in the GP Vocational Education
Programme…53% were male and 47% were female”.
A survey of rural GPs found that
90 percent of men and 45 percent of women were in full time practice.[16]
An indication of future problems has also
been identified by
1921 1926 2004
25-29
1.10 1.00 1.03
30-34
1.01 1.09 1.09
35-39
0.94 1.01 1.08
Note that
there appeared to be just one 5-year cohort where women greatly outnumbered men
after WW1, but there are two cohorts in this position now.
3.2.3 Analysis of
impacts, cause and effect, including changed behaviour
and incentives
It is not enough simply to identify an indicator, then, through regulations or other means, attempt to achieve a desired change. Policy analysis includes: a) consideration of reasons for the problem; b) identification of possible remedies; c) understanding relationships between the policy variables and the objectives; and d) assessment of possible behavioural responses as a result of the policies.
In addition, 1) ideally, any analysis should also pay attention to timing issues, lags in impact, and transitional adjustments. 2) There can be large differences between the ideal and the reality of implementation. For example, where legal interventions are suggested, aspects of costs, the expertise of those people involved in implementation, and the limitations of court and other processes should be born in mind.
Other dimensions include monitoring and basing policies on groupings of heterogeneous units (such as men and women) rather than specific criteria or principles. Central to all these issues are the limitations on policy options that we face as a result of lack of information and shortcomings of policy instruments and mechanisms for implementation. Failure to recognize these can mean that we develop overly interventionist and inappropriate policies.
4. Asking the right questions
It is not enough to get the correct answers to the questions raised. It is also important to consider whether the right questions are being asked. Should we be trying to close a “gender pay gap”? Is economic independence for women “the necessary condition for social and economic wellbeing”[17]? Many current policies are the culmination of an agenda for social change that has been developing over the past 20-30 years. They may be the objectives of a select subset of the population, rather than representing the aspirations of society as a whole. This leads to some questions.
Does the younger generation have different perspectives and aspirations? Are policies and social structures being determined by a small number of self-interested older people without a view of the long-term development of society as a whole, and without considering 1) the impact of policies rather than “righting self-defined ‘wrongs’”, and 2) the way policies influence the future, not present?
In that context, I would ask:
Given the focus on the future for young women, what signals are being given about the future for young men?
Is there a perspective that considers people (couples, families) working in partnership, and protection of their (relationship) investments?
Surely a vision of the future must present a whole-of-society perspective.
Appendix
Data from Statistics New
Table numbers refer to tables in the Statistics New Zealand publication.
From Table 11, 1996 and 2001 census figures on same sex couples with children:
1996 2001
Family Type by Child Dependency Status and Type of Couple
Couple with Dependent Child(ren) Only
Male Couple 105 303
Female Couple 387 750
Total 492 1,053
Couple with Adult Child(ren) Only
Male Couple 39 51
Female Couple 69 123
Total 108 177
Couple with Adult and Dependent Children Only
Male Couple 18 33
Female Couple 45 69
Total 60 102
From Table 8, some equivalent data for all couples:
1996 2001
Family Type by Child Dependency Status
Couple with Dependent Child(ren) Only 300,726 296,826
Couple with Adult Child(ren) Only 77,619 66,984
Couple with Adult and Dependent Children Only 41,541 39,135
From Table 5, the following data are for couples without children:
1996 2001
Type of Couple
Opposite-sex Couples 352,017 373,191
Male Couples .. 1,275 1,836
Female Couples .. 1,296 1,878
Total 354,588 376,905
Of same sex couples with children, the following numbers from the 2001 census refer to couples with one, two, three, four or more, and unknown numbers of dependent children:
528, 369, 156, 102, 24.
From Table 21, data on sole parent households (over 20% of these are with adult children only):
1991 1996 2001
Sex
of Parent
Male 27,492 28,491 33,366
Female 124,263 139,764 149,556
Total 151,752 168,255 182,916
[1] Bishop W (1984) “‘Is he married?’: Marriage as a signal”, The
University of Toronto Law Journal, Vol.34(3), pp.245-262
[2] Scott E, “Marital commitment and the legal
regulation of divorce”, Chapter 3 of Dnes, A. W. and
R. Rowthorn, eds. (2002) The Law and Economics of
Marriage and Divorce.
[3] Bridge C (1992) "Reallocation of Property After Marriage Breakdown: the Matrimonial Property Act 1976", in Henaghan M and Atkin B (eds.) Family Law Policy in New Zealand, Oxford: Oxford UP
[4] Statistics
[5] Waring M (1988) Counting for Nothing:
What Men Value and What Women are Worth,
[7] Bleakley L (2005)
“Compo wanted after 21 year fight with bureaucracy”, The Press, 8 June, http://www.stuff.co.nz/stuff/0,2106,3306291a10,00.html
[8] http://www.mwa.govt.nz/actionplanspecifics.html
[10] Birks S (2004) “Social engineering and equality of outcomes”, Asymmetric
Information, No.19, March, p.11
[11] Collins S (2005) “Have today's women got the jump on men?”, New Zealand Herald, 28 May, http://www.nzherald.co.nz/index.cfm?c_id=1&ObjectID=10127886
[14] Doyle S, Wylie C & Hodgen E, with Else A (2004) Gender and academic promotion: A case study of Massey University, New Zealand Council For Educational Research, Wellington, September, http://www.aus.ac.nz/status_women/GPR.pdf
[16]
Janes R, Elley
R and Dowell A (2004) “New Zealand Rural General Practitioners 1999 Survey
– Part 2: gender issues” , The New Zealand Medical Journal, Vol.117(1191),
2 April, http://www.nzma.org.nz/journal/117-1191/814/
[17] Ministry of Women’s Affairs, Briefing for the Incoming Minister
1999, http://www.mwa.govt.nz/women/brief/background.html