UNPAID HOUSEHOLD WORK - MEASUREMENTS FOR NATIONAL ACCOUNTS AND INCOME-DISTRIBUTION

The economic importance of unpaid household work has recently been subject to renewed interest by economists and policy makers and in public debate. Taking unpaid work into account in economic analysis may improve our understanding of the economic relations between the private sphere and the marketplace. In this article we discuss methods for assessing the economic contribution from unpaid household work. We first outline a macro-perspective and discuss the historical development of measuring unpaid household work in the national accounts in Norway. Then we focus on the micro-perspective and analyze the distribution of consumption possibilities provided by unpaid work, to get a more comprehensive measure of consumption possibilities than income traditionally measured. We define the concept of extended income, which is the sum of disposable income and the value of unpaid household work. With estimates based on data from the time budget survey, we analyze the distribution of extended income in different household types.