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Abstract
A recognized shortcoming of the present system of national accounting (the United Nations System of National Accounts) is the omission of nonmarket production from national accounts. Arguably, some of the most important nonmarket production carried out within the home relates to the care of children. This study estimates the monetary value of the childcare provided by parents to children ages 0–13 years in the United Kingdom, exploiting a unique data source that contains information on the amount of time spent on childcare from the perspectives of both parents and children. Using these data, the time input into childcare by parents and the time output of care are both measured and valued. Results at the micro level focus on variation of the imputed value of inputs and outputs of childcare by gender, household structure, and household composition. At the macro level, estimates of the imputed value of childcare are compared to the UK's gross domestic product (GDP).
Acknowledgments
Thanks to Maria Iacovou, Mark Taylor, Lara Taveres, Ciara Smyth, and Mary Hansen for helpful comments. Thanks to participants at the workshop on “Unpaid Work, Time Use, and Public Policy” in Washington, DC, for helpful comments. Earlier versions of this study were presented at the Institute for Social and Economic Research at the University of Essex, UK, and the IZA (Institute for the Study of Labor, Bonn) Topic Week in Non-Market Time. Thanks to participants at these presentations for helpful comments.
Notes
1 Colin Clark (Citation1958) credits Arthur Cecil Pigou with the classic jibe.
2 It is estimated that government expenditure in the UK could be about 2.2 percent of GDP (2004/05 level) by 2020 for early years childcare provision, placing the UK on par with current provision in some Scandinavian countries (Daycare Trust 2004).
3 See also Luisella Goldschmidt-Clermont (Citation1990); Ann Chadeau (Citation1992); Euston Quah (Citation1993); International Research and Training Institute for the Advancement of Women (INSTRAW; 1995, 1996); Duncan Ironmonger (Citation1996); Marilyn Waring (Citation1999); Steven J. Landefeld and Stephanie H. McCulla (2000); Sue Holloway, Sandra Short, and Sarah Tamplin (2002); Katharine G. Abraham and Christopher Mackie (2005).
4 The market-based accounts use three methods in total, the third being the production account, which is the sum of the value added at each successive stage in the production process. Taken together the three accounts must balance, thereby providing a triangulated observation of the value of market production at any point in time.
5 Note that in this study “Accompanying a child” is almost always recorded as a primary activity. The few instances that it is recorded as secondary are added to the time that is recorded as primary.
6 This method follows directly from the household production function developed by Gary Becker (Citation1965).
7 This issue of process benefits was first raised by Robert A. Pollak and Michael L. Wachter (1975), who referred to it as joint production, in a critique of Becker's (Citation1965) model. They highlighted that as well as using time to produce utility-yielding commodities, the use of time itself produced utility, thereby resulting in a type of joint production.
8 This study uses imputed variables for household income and childcare expenditure that were later appended to UKTUS 2000 to produce these results. See Tania Burchardt (Citation2006) for details.
9 The method of imputation involves looking at the episode location of the young person before and after the episode of homework or study. In cases where the episode location before and after the episode of homework or study is identical, this is the location that I impute. Where traveling is recorded before the episode, I impute the location after the episode of homework or study. Where traveling is recorded after homework or study, I impute the location before the episode of homework or study. These imputations provide location information for about 94 percent of all episodes of homework or study.
10 See Appendix for details of the sample I used to compute these ratios.
11 Altogether, 915 of the responding households meet these selection criteria, but twenty lone-father households are dropped from the sample. As a distinct group they are too small for meaningful analysis, and combining them with lone mothers to create a “lone-parent” group would be misleading given that the vast majority of this group would in fact be lone mothers.
12 These regressions initially included gross household income, housing tenure, and the availability of a car. None of these was statistically significant, and they were dropped from the regression. The final specification included number of parents, number of children, and the age of the youngest child in the household.