Time Use and Socio-Economic Accounts

Placing money values on unpaid household production is of general interest insofar as activities move into and out of the economy. Traditionally, this work has relied on identifying time devoted by households to the various categories of unpaid work, and valuing this by some appropriate wage rate. Recently interest has focussed on an alternative approach in which household consumption events are counted, and then valued by market-equivalent prices, enabling, for example, the calculation of domestic productivity (ie the rate of domestic output per hour of unpaid labour) to be estimated in a non-circular manner. We will apply these methods to our various harmonised datasets, to develop a view of international similarities and differences in the historical change in the money value of domestic production in the UK and elsewhere.

One alternative to converting household work into money values, is converting the money value of paid work into the time embodied within it. This leads to complete accounts of a society's production and consumption, in terms of the time that goes to satisfy the different sorts of human wants. We will use these methods as the basis for investigating historical changes and national differences and similarities in the evolution of the post-industrial societies covered by our datasets.