Proposal Description

Unpaid household activities, including cooking, cleaning, caregiving, and other forms of nonmarket production, contribute substantially to economic well-being but remain largely outside the production boundary of conventional national accounts. Advances in data collection, time-use surveys, administrative records, and statistical methodologies have created new opportunities to measure and value these activities more comprehensively. As economies evolve and demographic changes increase the importance of caregiving and other nonmarket services, improved measurement of household production will play an essential role in developing more inclusive and policy-relevant economic statistics. This session, sponsored by the International Association for Research in Income and Wealth, will review recent developments in the measurement of unpaid household production in both developed and developing countries. This session is particularly timely since the revised System of National Accounts 2025 recognizes the importance of unpaid household activities in providing a more complete picture of economic performance and growth. The session will discuss how to incorporate these activities into satellite accounts; alternative valuation methods; innovations in integrating time-use information with household surveys and national accounting frameworks to improve consistency and international comparability; differences between the methods used in developing and developed countries.

The session will bring together researchers and statisticians from the US and UK with those in Africa to discuss different approaches to estimate household production and unpaid work. The session will include a presentation by OECD on the changes to the 2025 SNA to incorporate household production in the National Accounts. Researchers in the US will discuss methods to use time use surveys to estimate household production and examine their effect on inequality in the US and Europe. Representatives from ESCoE in the UK will present advances in time use survey collection, incorporating AI, and their impact on measures of unpaid work. Researchers from the Statistics office in Morocco will present challenges in using time use survey data in estimating household production and constructing satellite household accounts. Finally, representatives in Zambia will provide their experiences with using time use survey data and estimating unpaid household activities.

NOTE: The International Association for Research in Income and Wealth is sponsoring this session as they are allowed an invited session at each ISI World Congress (the session in 2025 was https://www.isi-next.org/proposals/proposal/1120/detail/ , and https://www.isi-next.org/proposals/proposal/422/detail/ in 2023).