History of the GCPI

The Global Care Policy Index (GCPI) project began when Principal Investigator Anju Mary Paul wrote an op-ed for Channel News Asia in 2018 where she imagined how countries like Singapore would change their policies if there were an international ranking system that compared how well each country does in recognising and rewarding careworkers and caregivers. At the time, Anju did not think of actually creating such an index; it was just a thought experiment.

 

The next year, in 2019, she was introduced to Jocelyn Olcott, Professor of History and Gender Studies at Duke University, and Anju mentioned the idea of a Global Care Index to her. Jocelyn is the co-founder of a transnational research network, “Revaluing Care in the Global Economy” and she invited Anju to present the idea of the GCPI at an international workshop Jocelyn was organising in Amsterdam in December 2019. Soon after, Anju met Cynthia Chen, Assistant Professor of Statistics at the NUS School of Public Health, who had done a lot of work on constructing an Aging Index that compared different countries’ preparedness for their aging populations. Anju and Cynthia successfully applied for seed funding to assemble a team of students to begin constructing the GCPI.

In the summer of 2020, the pilot phase of the GCPI project was launched with 4 full-time students developing the scoring rubric and testing it on a handful of pilot countries.

The research team continues to grow, adding more members from Yale-NUS, NUS, Duke, and soon NYU Abu Dhabi. We have currently scored close to 30 countries.