Suchergebnisse

Who provides unpaid caregiving within the household is of economic and policy relevance. This paper examines how care activities are shared among household members, the extent to which women and men substitute for each other in care and work activities, and whether or not they realize economies of scale in care work. Mongolia and South Korea have nationally representative time-use survey data that allow an exploration of these questions. These two countries differ in their level of economic development and industrial structure, demographic profile, and household composition, providing a comparative perspective on the allocation of time to childcare, domestic work and market work within households. The maximum likelihood estimation results reveal significant evidence of substitution between men and women in childcare, but much less so in domestic work or indirect care, and economies of scale in the care of young children and in women's domestic work.

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.