This article provides new perspectives on the persistent hierarchy between ‘social’ and ‘economic’ goals in European Union's (EU) economic governance. We operationalize insights from feminist economics and political economy to analyse the agenda-setting documents of the European Semester – the Annual Growth Surveys (AGS) – showing how the much-debated integration of social goals into the European Semester is fundamentally constrained by mainstream economic epistemologies. These epistemologies misrepresent interrelationships between the productive economy and the reproductive labour needed to maintain it. Using interpretive policy analysis, we show how multiple concepts and measurements used to conceptualize policy goals and impacts within the AGSs, coalesce to systematically misrepresent reproductive labour as a ‘social’ activity, an irrelevance, or a cost, rather than a macroeconomic input. This restricts the possibilities of enhancing the social dimension of the European Semester, in ways conspicuously ignored by the existing literature, which are of heightened salience in the wake of Covid-19.

中文翻译：

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欧洲学期的死胡同和盲点：社会再生产危机的认识论基础


本文为欧盟 (EU) 经济治理中“社会”目标和“经济”目标之间持续存在的等级制度提供了新的视角。我们运用女权主义经济学和政治经济学的见解来分析欧洲学期的议程设置文件——年度增长调查（AGS）——展示了备受争议的将社会目标融入欧洲学期如何从根本上受到主流经济认识论的限制。这些认识论歪曲了生产性经济与维持生产性经济所需的再生产劳动之间的相互关系。通过解释性政策分析，我们展示了用于概念化 AGS 内的政策目标和影响的多种概念和测量方法如何结合起来，系统地将再生产劳动歪曲为“社会”活动、无关紧要的活动或成本，而不是宏观经济投入。这限制了增强欧洲学期社会维度的可能性，而现有文献明显忽视了这一点，而在 Covid-19 之后，这些文献变得更加突出。