This article deploys a feminist political economy approach centered on social reproduction to analyze the reconfiguration and regeneration of multiple inequalities in households and the labor markets during the COVID-19 pandemic. Based on this approach, the analysis unpacks the multiple trajectories of fragility the current crisis is intervening on and reshaping in the home and in the world of work, and their gendered and racialized features across the world. It shows how the pandemic and the measures to contain it have further deepened the centrality of households and reproductive work in the functioning of capitalism and argues that the transformative potential of the crisis can only be harnessed by framing policy and political responses around social reproduction and its essential contributions to work and life.

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Despite extensive attention being paid to the effects of the Universal Basic Income (UBI) on society at large, there has been little analysis on the relationship between gender inequality and UBI. The purpose of this article is first to reflect on the feminist arguments in favour of UBI and then to examine some of these points by also considering other available policies. By looking into the role of women’s work in both productive and reproductive activities, it is argued that UBI should not be disregarded as a social policy. However, its transformative capacity to empower women and to strengthen their role in society should not be overestimated. In order to address this gap, policy makers should address misconceptions around gender norms and acknowledge the multiple forms of women’s work across the social relations of production and reproduction.

This article presents an analysis of contemporary Uzbek agrarian change. First, using mixed methods and triangulating secondary and primary data from Samarkand, it untangles emerging relations of production and exchange during the slow processes of market transition. It shows that different types of public investment, price regulation, subsidies, procurement mechanisms, and the pace of marketization to which crops are subject shaped a slow growth of rural social differentiation and private accumulation. Traditionally, cotton farms have been in a privileged position because they have access to more land and subsidized inputs of production. However, due to recent fast‐track liberalization policies and state‐led investment, farms producing high value crops—fruit and vegetables—are at the forefront of a new pattern of private accumulation. Second, the article reflects on how the gradual approach to market transition has so far squeezed private accumulation, enabling the centralization of surplus extraction from cotton and wheat. This state‐led accumulation strategy is slowly fading, leaving space for market‐oriented reforms that will entail new but uncertain distributional and developmental outcomes within and outside agriculture.