Scholars

Senior Scholar Rania Antonopoulos is director of the Gender Equality and the Economy program at the Levy Institute. Currently on leave of absence, she has been serving since January 2015 as Alternate Minister of Labour, Government of Greece. She specializes in macro-micro linkages of gender and economics, international competition, and globalization; job guarantee policies and their macroeconomic and employment impacts; social protection and poverty reduction; and the implications of paid and unpaid work on poverty indicators. Antonopoulos has served as the macroeconomic policy adviser for UN Women, expert adviser and consultant for the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), and, since 2002, as a codirector of the GEM-IWG Knowledge Networking Program on Engendering Macroeconomics and International Economics. Her publications include:

• Gender Perspectives and Gender Impacts of the Global Economic Crisis (editor; Routledge, 2013);
• Unpaid Work and the Economy: Gender, Time Use and Poverty in Developing Countries (coeditor; Palgrave Macmillan, 2010);
• An Alternative Theory of Long-run Exchange Rate Determination (VDM Verlag, 2009);
• “The Unpaid Care Work–Paid Work Connection,” Working Paper No. 86, Policy Integration and Statistics Department, International Labour Office, Geneva, 2008;
• “State, Difference, Diversity: Toward a Path of Expanded Democracy and Gender Equality,” in Democracy, State, and Citizenship in Latin America, Vol. II (in Spanish; UNDP, 2008);
• Commentary on L. B. Shaw’s “Differing Prospects for Women and Men: Young Old-Age, Old Old-Age, and Eldercare,” in D. B. Papadimitriou, ed., Government Spending on the Elderly (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007); and
• “Asset Ownership along Gender Lines: Evidence from Thailand” (with M. Floro), Journal of Income Distribution (February 2005).

In 2007, Antonopoulos oversaw the launch of an interactive website as groundwork for the knowledge-sharing initiative Economists for Full Employment; EFE seeks to link and mobilize a global community of economists, academics, public policy advocates, and nongovernmental organizations, with the principal objective of placing decent job creation at the center of development and macroeconomic strategies. In 2006–7, she headed up a team of Levy Institute researchers studying the impact of public employment guarantee schemes (EGS) on pro-poor development and gender equality. The project, supported by a grant from the UNDP, consisted of a pilot study exploring the synergies between EGS and unpaid work—including unpaid care work—in India and South Africa. In 2010, she worked closely with the National Women’s Institute (INMUJERES), Government of Mexico, toward a similar initiative whose aim was public service job creation, primarily for women in rural areas of Mexico. Antonopoulos subsequently led a team of Levy Institute scholars in advising the Institute of Labour of the National Federation of Trade Unions (INE-GSEE) to implement a newly established emergency ELR program in all regions of Greece, funded by the Ministry of Labor and Social Protection, and in 2013 outlined a proposal for a large-scale direct job creation program in Greece (presented in a lecture at Columbia University in November of that year). With other Levy scholars, she was also involved in developing the Levy Institute Measure of Time and Income Poverty and applying it to the study of poverty in Latin America.

Antonopoulos holds a Ph.D. in economics from the New School for Social Research.