By — Siddarth Poola
Abstract
Modern economies are frequently described in terms of what they produce, but a more accurate description might be what they have decided not to count. This article examines two overlapping phenomena: the structural tendency of economic systems to profit from the very inefficiencies and dependencies they generate, and the systematic exclusion of unpaid domestic labour from national accounting frameworks. It also situates India’s emerging digital and logistics infrastructure within this broader conversation, asking whether a new kind of invisible economy is being layered on top of an old one, and whether the workers who run both will remain equally uncounted.
Introduction
There is a peculiar comfort in the idea that economies measure things accurately, that if something matters, it will eventually find its way into a number, and that the numbers we do have are at least attempting to reflect reality rather than politely ignoring large portions of it. This comfort is, unfortunately, not particularly well-founded. The Gross Domestic Product (GDP), the figure most governments treat as a report card, excludes an enormous volume of work that holds societies together, while enthusiastically counting a fair amount of activity that exists primarily to navigate or exploit systems of its own making. This is either a remarkable oversight or a remarkably convenient one, depending on how generously you want to read it.
The concept of the invisible economy has two reasonably distinct meanings in current literature. In one usage, the invisible economy refers to the digital and logistical infrastructure that underlies modern commerce systems consumers use constantly but never interact with directly. In another usage, more familiar to feminist economists and development scholars, the invisible economy refers to the vast quantity of unpaid domestic and care work that sustains households and communities. This is work performed primarily by women and excluded from GDP in every country that reports one.
To say that economies are structured to profit from problems they create is not a particularly radical claim once you begin looking at the evidence for it rather than against it. The economy operates on ‘productive capitalism’ (where businesses succeed by making things people want) to a system where businesses succeed by creating dependencies people cannot easily exit, and where entire sectors exist to navigate regulatory and financial complexity that serves no broader social purpose. This is, at minimum, worth thinking about alongside the question of why the labour that keeps people fed, clothed, and capable of showing up to those sectors remains statistically invisible.
The Architecture of What Doesn’t Get Counted
The exclusion of unpaid domestic work from national accounts is not a recent oversight waiting to be corrected but a deliberate feature of how the System of National Accounts, a framework to value the country and its assets, was constructed, one that has been critiqued for rendering the contribution of women invisible since at least the 1970s without resulting in any fundamental change to what gets measured. The argument for inclusion is not complicated: if a household employs a cook, a cleaner, and a childcare worker, all three appear in the GDP; if a woman performs the same three functions for her own household, none of it does. The economic activity is identical. The accounting treatment is entirely different. What distinguishes the two cases is, almost without exception, whether money changed hands and whether the person performing the work is a woman doing it for her family.
In India, the gender disparity in unpaid domestic work is not only substantial but structurally embedded, varying across states in ways that track closely with social norms, infrastructure access, and patriarchal attitudes rather than with individual choices made in a neutral environment. Indian women spend approximately 4.5 hours daily on unpaid household work, against roughly 52 minutes for men, a gap that, if valued at even a modest wage rate, would account for an estimated 13% of India’s GDP, more than either the manufacturing or agriculture sectors contribute. This number exists in academic papers and occasional development reports, and nowhere near the policy conversations where it might actually inconvenience someone.
What makes this exclusion structurally significant is the feedback loop it creates. When work is not counted, it is not funded. This causes the infrastructure that might reduce its burden to be perpetually underprioritised resulting in a vicious cycle of things never getting better or never getting counted. The unequal division of domestic labour is one of the primary drivers of interstate differences in women’s labour force participation in India, and yet the connection between these two things is rarely made explicit in the venues where economic policy is actually shaped. This is either a failure of analysis or an achievement of it, depending on whose interests the current arrangement serves.
Extraction Economies and The Efficiency of Manufactured Complexity
The other invisible economy is invisible in a very different sense. It is not excluded from GDP; it is simply not directly legible to the people who depend on it, which is more or less everyone. In India, it is basically UPI, the routing algorithms behind courier networks, the communication APIs through which every OTP and every banking alert travels, systems that are, in the language of investment analysis, mission-critical, recurring-revenue, high-switching-cost businesses. This is spectacular news for whoever owns them and a reasonably neutral fact for everyone else, unless you begin asking what kind of economy these systems are being built to serve. Once you realise that a significant proportion of modern economic activity consists not of creating value but of creating and maintaining systems from which value can be extracted, often by making those systems as difficult to exit as possible. The subscription model is a great example: services designed to be easy to enter and deliberately laborious to leave, where profitability is not based on user satisfaction but on user inertia. If you extend this logic, you arrive at a picture of an economy where complexity is not an unfortunate by-product of sophistication but a product in itself, manufactured and maintained because navigating it requires the services of a class of people whose entire professional existence depends on the complexity not being resolved.
The question this raises for India’s digital infrastructure story is not whether payment rails and data centres are useful but whether the economy being built on top of them will replicate the structural tendencies of the economies it is modelling itself on, where infrastructure enables extraction rather than production, where the mission-criticality of a system functions as a justification for its rent-seeking rather than a constraint on it. There is nothing in the architecture of a data centre that determines whether it serves a productive economy or an extractive one; that is determined by the regulatory, institutional, and distributional choices made around it, which are precisely the choices that tend to receive the least attention when the infrastructure itself is what is being celebrated.
The Structural Connection Between Two Kinds of Invisibility
It would be convenient if the two invisible economies described were simply a parallel phenomenon. Shockingly, however, they are not. The exclusion of unpaid domestic labour from economic accounting and the construction of economic systems that profit from manufactured dependency and complexity are connected, and the connection runs through the question of whose labour is considered worth organising around. Unpaid work and gender inequality makes the structural argument explicitly: the unequal division of labour by sex is the factor behind much of the economic discrimination against women, and the invisibility of that labour in national accounts systems is not a neutral measurement decision but a political one. It comes with political consequences for who has access to resources, whose time is treated as scarce, and whose contributions to social reproduction are treated as natural background conditions rather than economic inputs requiring support. When economies are designed without accounting for the infrastructure of care, they are designed around the assumption that care will happen anyway, performed by someone who is not being paid for it and whose alternative uses of time are therefore, of no consequence to the model.
This assumption is, as it turns out, structurally adjacent to the assumption that underlies extraction economies more broadly: that there is a substrate of activity and dependency to be relied upon without being compensated at its full value. The extraction economy profits from manufactured complexity because complexity creates dependency, and dependency creates a captive market for the services that navigate it. The domestic economy is exploited because reproductive labour creates social dependency, and that dependency has historically been converted not into bargaining power but into obligation. The mechanisms are different; the underlying logic, which is that value can be extracted from essential functions without fully accounting for the cost of providing them, is the same.
The COVID-19 pandemic made this connection briefly visible: when formal economic activity contracted and care demands expanded, it was women who absorbed the difference, experiencing sharp declines in labour force participation as schools closed and healthcare systems became overwhelmed, and receiving approximately zero policy acknowledgment for the added economic burden this represented. The economy, in other words, treated women’s unpaid labour as a shock absorber, which is precisely how extraction economies prefer to treat their inputs.
Conclusion
Economies measure what they choose to measure, which is not quite the same thing as what matters, and the gap between those two categories tends to fall in predictable places. The work that sustains households, raises children, and keeps people functional enough to participate in formal economic life remains outside the national accounts of every country that tracks GDP, which is to say, every country. The systems that profit from complexity and manufactured dependency are counted enthusiastically and critiqued rarely. And the new invisible economy being built in India will be shaped by whichever of these tendencies its architects decide to model.
The invisible economy, in both its senses, is not invisible because it is hidden. It is invisible because the accounting systems we use were designed by people with particular interests, who made particular choices about what to count and what to leave out, and whose choices have persisted. Changing them would require acknowledging that the current arrangement is not a natural feature of how economies work but a constructed one, maintained because it is useful, to someone, for it to remain exactly as it is, that is, if nothing else, an impressive piece of institutional architecture, as it turns out, than most of the things it refuses to count.
About the Author
Siddarth Poola is an undergraduate student at Jindal Global Law School, with a deep interest in Water Sports and a compunctious regard for Sports Law.
Image Source: https://phlearn.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/Invisible.jpg?quality=99
