Research On Measuring Households' Unpaid Work And Time-use Survey

The 1993 System of National Accounts (SNA) defines a production boundary which includes all goods produced by households for own consumption and leaves out all services except paid domestic services and owner-occupaid dwelling services. The 1993 SNA explicitly excludes most home production of services for own final consumption—households' unpaid work and voluntary work. In practice, some research show that the value of unpaid work is large in amount. If one country's output include unpaid work, it maybe not only change the trend of economic growth rate, but also influence the level of consumption and income distributiion. Some contries such as USA, Australia and European countries have been made a big progress in accounting the value of unpaid work. Howerver, the research on measuring unpaid work is still in blank phase in China.This paper discusses the significance of accounting unpaid work at first and then overviews the definition and scope of unpaid work. Secondly, we introduce time-use survey and analyze the results of time-use survey and its value in other countries. Lastly, according to some countries' experience, we design pilot time-use survey in two areas in China and also make a rough estimation of unpaid work in Xiamen city.The main inovations of this paper lies on the following three aspects: firstly, comparative analysis on time use for unpaid work and its value among several countries. Secondly, define our country's unpaid work and its clssification of activities and implement the first pilot time-use survey for unpaid work in our country. Lastly, utilize time use data we collected to analyze urban-rural disparity in unpaid work and estimate Xiamen's unpaid work value roughly.