Unpaid care work and the gender dividend in El Salvador

Werner Peña, Adriana Vides, María Elena Rivera, 2020. “Trabajo productivo no remunerado y dividendo de género en El Salvador”. Notas de Población, 109. January 2020. In Spanish.

ABSTRACT:

This article uses National Transfer Accounts (NTAs) and National Time Transfer Accounts (NTTAs) to highlight the contribution made to the economy by unpaid productive work, and to show how this relates to the gender dividend in El Salvador. As NTAs do not record unpaid domestic work or care activities, they underestimate the economic contributions made by those who mostly perform these tasks, namely women. To remedy this omission, NTTAs are used to estimate the production, consumption and time transfer of unpaid production and care work. A hypothetical scenario is configured to estimate the gender dividend that would be obtained from an increase in women’s labour market participation, which would enable El Salvador to exploit the demographic dividend more effectively. It is recommended that ways be found to meet the demand for care resulting from such a scenario.

The Quantity‐Quality Tradeoff: A Cross‐Country Comparison of Market and Nonmarket Investments per Child in Relation to Fertility

Vargha, L. and Donehower, G. (2019), The Quantity‐Quality Tradeoff: A Cross‐Country Comparison of Market and Nonmarket Investments per Child in Relation to Fertility. Population and Development Review, 45: 321-350. doi:10.1111/padr.12245

ABSTRACT:

The aim of this article is to show how various investments in children are related to fertility in a cross-national comparative context. We consider “child quality” as produced not only by market goods and services, but by inputs of unpaid care time as well. We integrate market investments in children with the imputed value of unpaid time devoted to childcare and other household services. Our measures are based on National Transfer Accounts (NTA) that disaggregate national accounts by age, extended by National Time Transfer Accounts (NTTA), which estimate the same quantities for nonmarket household production activities using time-use surveys and imputed wages. We find that: (1) unpaid care time represents a large portion of total investments in children; (2) there is a significant negative association between fertility and investments per child; and (3) incorporating unpaid care time into the analysis makes theorized relationships between quantity and quality of children more robust.

Counting unpaid work in Kenya: Gender and age profiles of hours worked and imputed wage incomes

Muriithi, M., Mutegi, R., and Mwabu, G. 2017 “Counting unpaid work in Kenya: Gender and age profiles of hours worked and imputed wage incomes.” The Journal of the Economics of Ageing, in press.

ABSTRACT:

The paper first presents profiles of unpaid work by age and gender before turning to profiles of their monetary values. We value unpaid work using a novel data set on hourly wages from the Kenya Gazette on salaries of workers covered by minimum wages mandated by the Government in 2015 (Republic of Kenya, 2015).

We count unpaid work performed by men and women at home, on the farm, and within household enterprises. In particular, focus is on unpaid work that is also typically performed away from home, such as child care. We value unpaid work using the delegation or third party criterion (Reid, 1934; Donehower, 2014).

We find that men work longer hours in household enterprises and earn more than women, but the reverse is true on the farm. The imputed wage incomes from unpaid work on the farm vary by gender and age over the life course, with men’s imputed wage-income profiles dominating women’s at older ages. General policy implications of the findings are briefly discussed.

Household production and consumption over the life cycle: National Time Transfer Accounts in 14 European countries

Vargha, L., Gál, R., and Crosby-Nagy, M., 2017. “Household production and consumption over the life cycle: National Time Transfer Accounts in 14 European countries” Demographic Research, 36: 905-944. DOI: 10.4054/DemRes.2017.36.32

ABSTRACT:

Background: While the importance of unpaid household labour is recognised in total economic output, little is known about the demographics of household production and consumption.

Objective: Our goal is to give a comprehensive estimation on the value of household production and its consumption by age and gender and analyse nonmarket economic transfers in 14 European countries based on publicly available harmonised data.

Methods: We introduce a novel imputation method of harmonised European time use (HETUS) data to the European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC) in order to assign time spent on home production to consumers in households and estimate time transfers. Moreover, monetary values are attributed to household production activities using data on earnings from the Structure of Earnings Survey (SES).

Results: We show that the nonmarket economic life cycle of men differs from that of women. The gender gap in household production is not evenly distributed over the life cycle. Women of working age contribute the most in net terms, while the main beneficiaries of household goods and services are children and to a lesser extent adult men. These patterns are similar across countries, with variations in the gender- and age-specific levels of home production and consumption.

Conclusions: In Europe, in the national economy, intergenerational flows are important in sustaining both childhood and old age. In contrast, in the household economy, intergenerational transfers flow mostly towards children.

Contribution: We add a new focus to the research on household production: While keeping the gender aspect, we demonstrate the importance of the life cycle component in household production.

Incorporating household production into the National Transfer Accounts for Slovenia

Sambt, J., Donehower, G., and Verbič, M. (2016) “Incorporating household production into the National Transfer Accounts for Slovenia.” Post-Communist Economies, 28(2): 249-267.

ABSTRACT:

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.

Retos para materializar el dividendo de género

Jiménez-Fontana, P., 2016. "Retos para materializar el dividendo de género". Revista Población y Salud en Mesoamérica, 13(2).

ABSTRACT:

The gender dividend is a potential opportunity for economic growth due to an increase in women’s participation in the labor market; however, non-remunerated work can be a barrier to increase women’s labor force participation. In order to analyze the relationship between non-remunerated production and the potential gender dividend, this article analyzes time use age profiles, and the non-remunerated production and consumption in Costa Rica. Furthermore, the study estimates a potential unmet demand of childcare. The paper uses the methods developed by the international network National Transfer Accounts. The main results of the study confirm that women are the responsible for household work, while men on average specialize in the labor market. The results show that there is not more co-responsibility between men and women of younger generations. The materialization of the gender dividend depends heavily on public policies that seek to reduce women’s household workload and increase quality jobs opportunities.