Valuing Unpaid Child Care in the U.S.: A Prototype Satellite Account Using the American Time Use Survey

Abstract

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

Measuring what matters and guiding policy: An evaluation of the Genuine Progress Indicator

“…The satellite accounts intended as a response to GDP's neglect of non-market services are also a variant of the monetary approach. They supplement existing national income accounts by calculating an adjusted GDP after estimating the monetary value of services such as unpaid household work, services of consumer durables and childcare (Kanal and Kornegay, 2019;Suh and Folbre, 2016), or of environmental assets and service flows in the case of the United Nations System of Environmental-Economic Accounting. 2 They seek to measure total consumption consistent with a monetary indicator such as the GPI and serve to experiment with different valuation scenarios, but the (household and environmental) accounts are not combined.…”

“…Estimations of the value of unpaid household work relative to GDP have highlighted its importance while underscoring the underestimation of the time devoted to childcare and therefore the value of household production (e.g. Suh and Folbre, 2016).…”

“…For example, household satellite accounts can show how the value of childcare and adjusted GDP vary with different wage rates for caregivers. That being said, satellite accounts provide only a partial picture limited to the dimension that they focus on(Suh and Folbre, 2016).…”

Der Gesamtbetrag der Arbeit in den Arbeitsmarktstatistiken

“…The framework adopted by the Resolution is consistent with the guidelines issued by a panel study of the National Research Council (2005), entitled "Beyond the market: Designing nonmarket accounts for the United States" and adopted to construct the satellite accounts for home production in the US (e. g. Landefeld et al 2009;Bridgman et al, 2012;Suh and Folbre, 2015). In particular, the National Research Council guidelines clearly delimit home production by establishing that it should include only those activities that could be carried out by a third person outside the household, paid at the market wage.…”

Home Production and China's Hidden Consumption

“…The measurement of home production relies on time-use data from large-scale time-use surveys or from national representative household surveys. A good amount of work has been done in developed economies, with earlier work by Hawrylyshyn (1976) and Gronau (1986), more recently followed by Ramey (2009), Landefeld et al (2009), Suh and Folbre (2016, Bridgman et al (2012), and Aguiar et al (2012). With more data on time use becoming available in developing countries over the past two decades, a growing interest in time-use patterns and unpaid care work in the context of developing countries (e.g.…”