Dressing a ghost: size and value of unpaid family care

Unpaid family care work encompasses care and assistance provided by members of a household to other members. It is not considered to be a productive activity, and its exclusion from national account statistics contributes to keeping it invisible. We compare Italy and Poland, two countries that have taken different paths towards economic development, but share cultural features that influence unpaid family care work. We estimate the value of unpaid family care work with the opportunity cost and the market replacement cost methods, drawing data from the Polish and the Italian time use surveys and the IT-SILC. Our results show that unpaid family care work represents a substantial proportion of national production in both countries, ranging from 3.7 to 5% of GDP, depending on the method of estimation. The results likewise show that the size, gender distribution and value relative to GDP of unpaid family care work are remarkably similar, suggesting that, in spite of the different history of economic development in the two countries, cultural factors play a key role in determining family decisions that affect unpaid family care work.     

A measurement of the extent of market imperfections between markets and applications

This study estimates the size and value of unpaid family caretaking activities at a European level. While at a country level several studies are available, a comprehensive evaluation for Europe as a whole was missing so far, mainly due to data limitations. This article fills this gap using a method that merges the information of the European Survey of Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC) with the Harmonised European Time Use Surveys (HETUS). Monetary values of unpaid family domestic work and unpaid family childcare work are obtained applying both the opportunity cost and the market replacement approaches. For Europe as a whole, the total value of these activities ranges between 17% and 31.6% of the EU Gross Domestic Product (GDP), depending on the applied methodology. The national values of these activities are discussed and an interpretation of the country and gender differentials in family caretaking costs is given in terms of differences in culture, economic development and welfare state.     

The Care Economy in Post-Reform China: Feminist Research on Unpaid and Paid Work and Well-Being

ABSTRACT

As China embarked on the path of economic and social reforms, social provisions from the Maoist era were dismantled, and care responsibilities shifted back from the state to the household. Rural–urban migration, a steep decline in fertility, and increasing longevity have led to changes in the age structure of the population both overall and by region. Using seven different surveys, the eleven contributions in this volume study the distributive consequences of post-reform care policies and the impact of unpaid care responsibilities on women’s and men’s opportunities and gender inequality. Overall, reduced care services have created care deficits for disadvantaged groups, including low-income rural elderly and children. The shifted care burden has also limited women’s ability to participate fully in the market economy and has contributed to rising gender inequalities in labor force participation, off-farm employment, earnings, pensions, and mental health outcomes.     

Gender,Work Burden,and Mental Health in Post-Reform China

ABSTRACT

This study investigates how total work burden, including paid work and unpaid care work, affects the mental health of prime-age, employed women and men in urban China. Based on the 2010 China Family Panel Studies (CFPS), regression results indicate that total work burden is negatively related to the mental health of both men and women, consistent with the idea that additional work hours reduce time available for rest and leisure. Women have longer working hours and are more likely to be time poor than men, and this gender inequality in total work burden contributes to the gender gap in mental health. The relationships between the components of total work burden – paid and unpaid work – and mental health shed further light on the strength of gender norms and the barriers to redistribution of unpaid work from women to men necessary to reduce the gender gap in mental health.     

Gender Patterns and Value of Unpaid Care Work: Findings From China's First Large‐Scale Time Use Survey

Using data from the 2008 China Time Use Survey, this paper examines the gender patterns of time allocation over paid work, unpaid care work, and non‐work activity and estimates the monetary value of unpaid care work. A seemingly unrelated regression (SUR) technique is applied to explore the tradeoff between the three types of activity. The estimates show that, holding constant individual characteristics and regional effects, the total work time of women is higher than that of men by 7 hours per week in the rural sector and by 10.5 hours per week in the urban sector. The monetary value of unpaid care work is estimated by five methods. Depending on the method used, the value assigned to unpaid care work varies from 25 to 32 percent of China's GDP, from 52 to 66 percent of final consumption, and from 63 to 80 percent of the gross products of tertiary industry.     

Unpaid Care Work's Interference with Paid Work and the Gender Earnings Gap in China

This paper examines the effects of unpaid care work on the earnings of men and women in China by using data from the 2008 China Time Use Survey, the country's first, large-scale time-use survey. The study introduces three indicators to measure the degree to which unpaid care work may “interfere” with paid work, either by directly disrupting it or by being intertwined with it. The regression estimates show that while the amount of time spent on unpaid care work negatively affects the earnings of both men and women, the interference of unpaid work with paid work lowers earnings more for women than for men. Quantitatively, the gender differences in the time spent on unpaid care work and its interference with paid work account for 28 percent of the gender earnings gap in China.     

Incorporating household production into the National Transfer Accounts for Slovenia

The National Transfer Accounts (NTA) have recently been developed to measure economic flows across age groups. In this article, we extend the NTA for Slovenia by including the value of unpaid household production. Based on time-use data, we discover that people in Slovenia spent even more time on household production than on paid work, which emphasises the necessity of including household production in the NTA analysis. We find that there are large net transfers of household production flowing from adults to children, and to a lesser extent also to the elderly. We calculate unpaid production separately for both genders, and discover that females provide much more unpaid production and total productive work than males. In addition, they face a much more intensive ‘rush hour of life’ than males. We expect that similar patterns may be found in other post-communist countries where equalising labour force participation by gender was central to the communist agenda, but where no similar efforts were undertaken to equalise household work burdens.     

Counting outputs,capital inputs and caring labor: Estimating gross household product

The estimation of Gross Household Product, the economic value added by the unpaid work and own capital of households outside the boundary of the System of National Accounts, should be addressed through household input-output satellite accounts which count household outputs, value them at market prices, and include an allowance for capital as a factor of production. This paper uses internationally comparable survey data to estimate the relative magnitudes of the gender division of the millions of hours of paid, unpaid and total work in twelve OECD countries, puts a dollar value on Gross Household Product in Australia, looks more closely at who provides care and nurture in households and suggests some urgent issues for attention.     

Comparing Care Regimes in Europe

Throughout Europe, the family is still an important provider of care, but welfare state policies of individual countries may support and/or supplement the family in different ways, generating different social and economic outcomes. This article compares and categorizes care strategies for children and elderly persons in different member states of the European Union, while also taking into account the varied modalities for providing care, like leave arrangements, financial provisions, and social services. In EU countries, care regimes function as “social joins” ensuring complementarity between economic and demographic institutions and processes. As these processes and institutions change, they provide impetus for care regimes to change as well. However, because ideas and ideals about care are at the core of individual national identities, care regimes also act as independent incentive structures that impinge on patterns of women's labor market participation and fertility.     

Gender-Based Occupational Choices and Family Responsibilities: The Gender Wage Gap in Italy

This paper explores the relationship between the gender division of labor, occupational choices, and the gender wage gap in Italy. In Italy, cultural factors and low availability of formal childcare services define gender roles that are generally based on the male breadwinner model, in which childcare is almost completely entrusted to women. The analysis is carried out through an extension of the Oaxaca–Blinder decomposition and is based on data from the 2007 Italian National Institute for Workers’ Professional Development (ISFOL). The results are consistent with gender discrimination on wages and suggest that women’s occupational paths are often an outcome of limited choices, and that women’s unpaid domestic work negatively interferes with the energy women can put into paid work. These findings support the need to ensure gender equality in and out of the labor market, especially through deep changes in Italian social norms and through the development of formal childcare.     

Gender Norms and the Gendered Distribution of Total Work in Latin American Households

This study uses time-use survey data for Mexico, Peru, and Ecuador (from 2009, 2010, and 2012, respectively) to analyze differences between countries in terms of the gendered distribution of total work, which includes both paid and unpaid work. It explores whether the variations in the total time worked by women and men, and, particularly, the gender gap unfavorable to women, can be explained by substantive national differences in gendered social norms. Using data from the World Values Survey (WVS; 2010–14), this study computes a gender norms index to measure cross-country differences in gender norms. It finds that more egalitarian countries exhibit higher levels of equality in the gendered distribution of total work.     

“Ending Welfare as We Know It”: The Symbolic Importance of Welfare Policy in America

In this paper, I offer a framework for analyzing non-market oriented household activities in a way that overcomes some issues about defining the boundaries among household activities. I utilize the concept of a social process and discuss how unpaid household activities are part of labor, care, recreation, and consumption processes. Next, I explain the importance of introducing economic class and social class processes into the framework, as well as the importance of making a distinction between the two. Economic class accounts for the basics of the capitalist economy, and social class opens contexts of variation. The framework allows for a multidimensionality of individuals and opens the question of unpaid activities varying in categorization based on economic class. Also, it helps the economic analysis of capitalism consider that maintaining a household lifestyle directly involves and pertains to unpaid household activities that are part of each of the delineated labor, care, recreation, and consumption processes.     

The Impact of China's New Rural Pension Program on Elderly Labor,Grandchild Care,and Old-Age Support

ABSTRACT

This study examines how a social pension program changes paid work patterns and expectations about the source of future financial support for the elderly in China. Using the 2011 and 2013 waves of the China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study (CHARLS), the study finds that the New Rural Pension Program (NRPP) reduced the hours of farmwork and increased the hours of grandchild care among elderly rural men; and both elderly women and men reported less expected reliance on adult children for financial support when they become infirm. These differential effects probably occur because the size of the pension benefit is very small and because of previous gender differences in farmwork and grandchild care. Additionally, the study shows that adult children reduced out-migration and increased their hours spent in farming activities, indicating that the effect of the NRPP has spilled over to younger members of the household.     

成年子女照料者角色经历的性别差异研究

通过对15名成年子女照料者的质性研究,"养儿防老"、"嫁夫随夫"、"男主外、女主内"和"女儿也是传后人"等新旧观念相互交织,成年子女在养老责任担当方面"性别差异"发生了新变化;儿子、女儿和儿媳照料经历也因此各不相同。成年子女的种种照料负担和压力反映了当前老龄化社会中独生子女家庭面临的照料困境,为家庭照料者提供各种社会支持服务是十分必要的。     

Post-Crisis Gender Gaps: Women Workers and Employment Precariousness

The Gender Gap Index (GGI) is very useful when it comes to international comparisons, and it offers diverse and interesting approaches to equality, human wellbeing, and development. The central goal of this paper is to demonstrate the way in which this index is indirectly related to the distribution of public expenditure in different strategic sectors of economic development. When reducing healthcare and education expenditures in order to service the external debt due to institutional investors of the shadow financial system (SFS), the gender gap widens because of the austerity policies implemented by the state. This contributes to deepening of the unpaid work within the household, alongside widening the gender gap.     

Gender Gaps in Unpaid Domestic and Care Work: Putting The Pandemic in (a Life Course) Perspective

Our paper examines  trends in gender inequalities in unpaid domestic and care work over the short- and long-term in Australia, including assessing the impact of the COVID-19 lockdowns. We use the concept of time—historical, biographical and transitional—as a framework for our analyses. Drawing on data from the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) Survey, we find wide and continuing gender gaps in unpaid work over the past two decades. We demonstrate that parenthood is a far greater producer and exacerbator of gender inequalities in unpaid domestic and care work than COVID-19 lockdowns.     

To Measure and to Narrate: Paths Toward a Sustainable Future

This contribution engages with the question of measurement of economic well-being from a feminist ecological perspective. It starts from the dual premises that it is necessary to recognize and value as important the economic, social, and environmental contributors to economic welfare and desirable for ecological and feminist economists to collaborate in moving toward a sustainable future. The study examines the Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI), formulated and developed by environmental-ecological economists, as a potentially useful measure that responds to both feminist and ecological economic concerns by making visible unpaid care labor and the environment. As an accounting framework that applies the monetary imputation approach, the GPI is objectionable to some ecological and feminist economists. Reviewing debates among feminist and ecological economists, this study argues that the goals and potential objections of both groups may be addressed by complementing GPI with a narrative approach in a plural and conditional policy-input process.     

Hidden in Plain Sight: Unpaid Household Services and the Politics of GDP Measurement

ABSTRACT

Gross domestic product (GDP) is one of the world’s most influential and widely cited economic indicators. However, outside of the industrialised, market-based context in which the indicator was first designed, GDP measurement suffers from a number of biases and blind spots. The article zooms in on one of these: the exclusion of unpaid household services from the production boundary of the System of National Accounts, the international standard underpinning GDP methodology. While GDP has expanded over time to include activities as diverse as financial services and the informal sector, the treatment of unpaid household services has remained unchanged. Why is this? I find that staff in the statistical departments of international organisations such the United Nations, International Monetary Fund and World Bank have a tremendous degree of agency in the governance of GDP. While these statisticians are aware of and engage with criticisms, they reject the inclusion of unpaid household services based on shared professional norms and economic ideas.     

城市居民的居住期望及其对养老方式选择的影响

以城市居民为研究对象,从江苏省四个城市随机抽取813位居民进行访问式问卷调查,以居住安排与养老方式的关系作为分析视角,从个体特征,家庭的社会经济地位,居住结构状况,养老观念等几个纬度出发,经由交互分析和Logistic回归分析的方法,具体阐明了城市居民的居住期望和养老意愿的现状,并进而论证了影响他们做此选择的可能因素。多数城市居民老年时将独自(与配偶)居住,依靠社会化养老或自我服务可能会成为城市居民安度晚年的主流形式。     

Unfolding Patterns of Unpaid Household Work in Latin America

Although Colombia, Mexico, Peru, and Uruguay show similar empirical patterns in terms of time women devote to unpaid work, they also present important variations in how unpaid work is distributed between men and women. Using time-use surveys for the 2007–10 period, this study finds a uniform pattern across the four countries regarding the main individual-level variables related to the allocation of unpaid work. When decomposing the gender gap in hours devoted to unpaid work, most of the difference cannot be attributed to variations in observable characteristics of men and women: the unexplained part of the gap is the dominant part. Results suggest that both the strength of traditional gender roles and existing welfare architecture are relevant factors in understanding variations in how unpaid work is distributed between men and women in these four countries. The results reaffirm that powerful interventions are needed to shift gender norms about unpaid work.