The State of Care: Exposing a Macroeconomic Blindspot
- RIINE
- Dec 23, 2025
- 3 min read
In India alone, women perform an estimated 2.6 billion hours of unpaid care work every single day...
Across most economies, including emerging ones like India, care remains off the budget and the balance sheet. It is a foundational, yet invisible, pillar of our economies. And its continued exclusion from economic policy is not just a gender oversight. It is a macroeconomic blindspot.
In India alone, women perform an estimated 2.3 billion hours of unpaid care work every single day, an invisible subsidy that props up the formal economy without compensation, recognition, or inclusion in policy or fiscal planning. This work underwrites productivity, fills the gaps left by weak public infrastructure, and sustains the labour force, yet it remains invisible in GDP, uncounted in budgets, and ignored in investment decisions.
For years, we’ve spoken about care through the lens of gender disparity or data gaps. But this isn’t only about gender inequality. It’s also a structural failure in how we define value, measure growth, allocate public finance, and design our economic systems.
Across India, Indonesia, Vietnam, Cambodia, and the Philippines, in the Asian context, absence of formal care systems, childcare, eldercare, disability support, long-term care constrains women’s labour force participation, deepens income inequality, and undermines long-term resilience.
The evidence is in. It’s time to treat care as an engine of economic growth
Introducing the State of Care Theme
The State of Care initiative at RIINE, was created to challenge outdated assumptions, close critical data and policy gaps, and reimagine care as a central lever of inclusive, sustainable, and future-ready economies. Through grounded research, multi-country analysis, field insights, leadership briefs, tools, models and public policy dialogues, State of Care aims to drive a structural shift:
→ From informal to formal care systems
→ From private burden to public investment
→ From invisible labour to measurable infrastructure inputs
We will explore how undervaluing care distorts everything, from labour markets to fiscal policy, and how investing in care strengthens economic transformation, productivity, and inclusion.
If the most essential labour in our economy is also the least paid, least recognised, and least protected, what does that say about our growth model?
What to Expect from the State of Care?
Over the coming months, State of Care will curate country specific initiatives to help visualise care needs, map care infrastructure and policy gaps apart from identifying care financing pathways and innovations. We will bring together research backed features and insights, tools, data and design strategies to help reframe care as an economic engine of growth and embed it into country growth models.
We start this with the Caring Futures Resource Hub - A leadership empowerment and knowledge hub that will provide insights on country specific care ecosystems, synthesis mandates, review schemes and delivery models, curate roadmaps for policy and practices to shape resilient care systems.
The Caring Futures hub is gradually rolling out, starting December 2025. We start with a 6-part Caring Futures Spotlight edition. Track the rolling series and find more information on the Caring Futures Resource Hub here
Why We Created State of Care
At its core, this theme is driven by a simple but urgent proposition. Care is not the economy’s afterthought. It is its foundation.
It is time we count it. Fund it. Plan for it.
