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Abstract
This study examines unpaid work in the household in Guatemala using data from a national 2000 household survey (ENCOVI 2000), which included a time-use module. The contribution highlights the importance of unpaid work in Guatemalan households in economic terms and concludes that in 2000, its value was equivalent to approximately 30 percent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) for that year. The value of unpaid work is estimated using an opportunity cost approach applying market wages as well as different measures of replacement costs. The study then explores the nature of time poverty in Guatemala and examines the determinants of being both time and income poor, concluding that women are more likely to experience this condition. The study also finds that investment in small infrastructure and ownership of an electric or gas stove has the potential to reduce time and income poverty in Guatemala, primarily by alleviating women's time burdens and making their unpaid household work more efficient.
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Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Lourdes Colinas, Marzia Fontana, Matthew Hammill, Juan Carlos Moreno-Brid, Juan Luís Ordaz, Monica Orozco, Mercedes Pedrero Nieto, Indira Romero, Lina Salazar, Imraan Valodia, and Marceline White for their valuable comments on earlier versions of this study.
Notes
1 These countries include Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Costa Rica, Cuba, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Uruguay, and Venezuela.
2 These estimates were calculated for seventeen countries in Latin America and weighted by the working age population (CEPAL 2007).
3 Own estimates based on data from CEPAL (2007).
4 These data are from national household surveys in the region.
5 These data summarize the situation in fifteen countries in Latin America and express the hourly gender wage gap; see Milosavljevic (Citation2007).
6 Programs like Oportunidades in Mexico, Red Solidaria in El Salvador, Bolsa Familia in Brazil, Familias en Acción in Colombia, and PATH in Jamaica exemplify conditional cash transfer programs that require inputs of time from beneficiary families.
7 For further information, see ENCOVI 2000.
8 Not including community labor may substantially underestimate the time spent in unpaid work, particularly in indigenous communities where communal labor is particularly important. This category of unpaid work was excluded from the analysis undertaken for this study because the labor was not undertaken in the household for the direct benefit of household members.
9 Reservation wages are the minimum wages for which a person currently outside the labor market would accept a job and enter the labor market.
10 I used the following industries and sectors to provide a close approximation of the labor services provided in the household: hotel and restaurant services; education, social, and healthcare services; agriculture; clothing manufacture; construction; community, social, and personal services; and private household services. Additionally, I used a variety of occupation codes to identify workers with few or no qualifications, using the number of years of schooling reported in the questionnaire.
11 Returns to schooling captures the economic return for each year of formal education completed reported in the household survey.
12 Other studies noted similar results: Andres Zamudio Citation1995; James Heckman and Xuesong Li 2004; Juan Luis Ordaz Citation2007.
13 The intersection approach counts as poor only those who meet the criteria for poverty in each of the different dimensions. This differs from the union approach, in which an individual is considered poor if he or she is poor in at least one of the multiple dimensions considered. In this case, we are looking at only two dimensions of poverty: income and time (see Alkire and Foster 2007). The income poverty line applied here monetizes a basic basket of consumption items for urban and rural areas.
14 All values are expressed in 2009 prices.