A woman's reckoning: a feminist analysis of the power of the internationally accepted conception and implementation of the United Nations System of National Accounts
The United Nations System of National Accounts (UNSNA) was the formal and global institutionalization of the development of national accounts over a period of several centuries. Each man responsible for the development is historically located within a government in the midst of mercantile, colonial expansionism (civil and colonial wars) or global conflict (World Wars I & II). While apologists for the pathology now evident in the implementation of the UNSNA describe its conception as an attempt, with limited indicators and blunt tools, to produce the best possible measurement system for a particular short-term historical contingency, the over-riding ideology of power inherent in the conception and implementation of the UNSNA is patriarchy. Given the maintaining this system in place are devastating - both to and for the majority of the human species, and for the eco-system of the planet. This thesis establishes the conception of the UNSNA in Western political and economic patriarchal ideology. It exposes, in the narrow terms of the UNSNA, the major flaws of the system, and the passage of 'blame' from one 'profession' to another in locating responsibility for the perpetuation of a chronically impaired system. Then the thesis examines the nature of 'reproduction' not as 'another form of production', but as the primary exchange, the economic principle before and beyond which no production can exist. The absence of this concept from political economy, even as an extended debate is distinctly patriarchal. The environment, by way of analogy with women and children, suffers a similar rape, abuse, enslavement, and invisibility in the conception and implementation of the UNSNA. The global resource abuses and the policy consequences of such a treatment are examined in detail. Various reforms suggested of the UNSNA have been and are being developed. While some would offer the possibility of short-term policy options which would be of some improvement, the problem of pursuing only one indicator, the market dollar, remains. My own experience as a legislator has seen this as a barren basic, and I discuss a variety of options. Throughout 'A Woman's Reckoning', the approach is one of feminist scholarship, and the theoretical and political base of the thesis are unavoidably those of an enquiring activist.
United Nations System of National Accounts, Sex discrimination
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