*** Welcome to piglix ***

Valuation of Nonmarket Housework


The valuation of nonmarket housework comprises attempts to attach value to non-exchange domestic tasks. Housework may include a variety of activities, particularly those traditionally associated with housekeeping (or homemaking), along with child care and nurturing. These activities have recognizable economic and social significance, but are not included in standard economic measurements, such as the gross domestic product (GDP). While the symbolic or subjective benefits of housework are difficult to measure, various attempts have been made to attach value to economically productive household activity.

Traditional means of tracking economic activity, such as the gross domestic product (GDP), do not take account of non-exchange, nonmarket household activity. Therefore, various adjustments to GDP calculations and novel measurements have been proposed, such as the GPI or GHP.

In 2012, the US Department of Commerce Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) created an adjusted measure of GDP to account for productive household activity. By using detailed time use surveys for the period 1965-2010, the BEA found that incorporating “nonmarket household production” raises the GDP measure by 39% in 1965 and 26% in 2010. The surveys used seven categories of time use in American household production (housework, cooking, odd jobs, gardening, shopping, child care, and domestic travel) and the BEA assigned a low-end market wage to the hours spent on each activity.

The declining impact on the adjusted GDP reflects the steadily decreasing number of (nonmarket) hours households spent on home production. While men increased their weekly hours of home production in the time span from 14 to 17, this increase was more than offset by the decline in women's home production from 40 to 26 hours. The BEA explains this shift by increased women's participation in the work force as well as the steadily decreasing market wages of household workers (such as cleaners and nannies), raising the opportunity costs of self-participation and encouraging outsourcing.

The GPI is an alternative to GDP as a measure of economic growth that is generally designed to incorporate environmental and social factors that are not traditionally included. While much of the focus is typically placed on environmental costs, most GPI measurements explicitly include additions for the value of household work and parenting.

One of the most well-known examples is the GPI measure used across Atlantic Canada. In a 1999 report GPI Atlantic describes the household production infrastructure as akin to the access to raw materials, labour and markets required for the business sector. The Atlantic GPI employs time use variables and assigns explicit monetary values to unpaid work according to its replacement value in the market. According to their (1999) measurements, “unpaid work contributes $325 billion worth of services to the Canadian economy annually” and they argue that GPI analysis should be explicitly incorporated into policy considerations.


...
Wikipedia

...