While the economic burden of simultaneously caring for young and old family members is widely recognized, it has yet to be accurately measured. Yet, such assessments are relevant both to public policies providing support to family caregivers and to private insurance markets for long-term care. This descriptive study presents a new method to address this problem: the construction of a crosswalk between time-use diaries and other types of surveys using lists of activities of daily living (ADLs) and instrumental activities of daily living (IADLs) for which assistance is required. Analysis of pooled data from American time use survey 2003–2012 provides some quantitative indicators, but understates the temporal burden of care and fails to distinguish types of care that involve personal interaction from those that do not. A crosswalk of time-use survey categories with the list-based approach typically applied in public health surveys clearly demonstrates the importance of clear definitions and also offers more precise measures. Depending on how sandwich caregiving was defined, the temporal burden for caregiving ranged from 11.2 to 60 h per week, clustering at around 20 h per week for most cases. This result demonstrates the magnitude of sandwich care demands and also underscores the need for improved care survey design. As shown in this study, such efforts should take into account the implications of disaggregating data by gender and age, and definitional variations that characterize existing datasets.
This paper builds on previous satellite accounts that treat households as production units, but challenges their measurement and valuation of time devoted to child care, making a case for the inclusion of supervisory child care time that does not overlap with other productive activities. We also suggest several other methodological refinements for estimates based on analysis of data from the American Time Use Survey: application of a vector of specialized replacement cost wage estimates for different child care activities rather than a single wage, and adjustments for the ratio of children to adults present and for the educational attainment of caregivers. Our estimates of the value of child care alone in 2004 and 2010 exceed previous estimates of the value of all non-market household production in the U.S. The end result is an upward adjustment of Gross Domestic Product by about 43 percent compared to previous adjustments of about 26 percent. JEL Codes: D13, E1, J13
A growing body of scholarly literature has attempted to measure and value unpaid care work in various countries, but perhaps only the government statistical agencies in the United States and the United Kingdom have seriously undertaken periodic and systematic measures of the time spent on unpaid work at the national level, and partially incorporated those values into their gross domestic product(GDP). One country that has been ahead of its time on aspects of societal welfare measurement is Bhutan, which produces the Gross National Happiness (GNH) Index. However, until the first GNH Survey, in 2008, Bhutan did not have any sense of the size and distribution of unpaid work, despite its strong societal norms about the value of volunteering and community work. This paper is the first to estimate the value of unpaid care work in Bhutan. It shows the pros and cons of various approaches and their equivalent measures of unpaid care work as a share of GDP. As with similar studies on the topic, this paper also finds that women spend more than twice as much time as men performing unpaid care work, regardless of their income, age, residency, or number of people in the household. The paper also provides recommendations for improving the measurement of unpaid care work in Bhutan.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.