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Household Work and National Income Accounting: to Include or not to Include?
Author(s) -
Quah Euston
Publication year - 1992
Publication title -
asian economic journal
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.345
H-Index - 28
eISSN - 1467-8381
pISSN - 1351-3958
DOI - 10.1111/j.1467-8381.1992.tb00079.x
Subject(s) - economics , work (physics) , production (economics) , national accounts , valuation (finance) , household income , public economics , macroeconomics , accounting , geography , mechanical engineering , archaeology , engineering
To a large extent household work research to date has concentrated on solving conceptual, theoretical and methodological problems with regard to its measurement and valuation, providing empirical estimates on country studies on the magnitude of household production, and on household production modelling. While no doubt many of these efforts are useful and praiseworthy, there remains a question neglected or crucially unanswered: should household work be included or excluded from the measurement of national income? This question is important for unless it is answered, the estimates generated as in country studies would be meaningless. The purpose of this paper is to synthesize all arguments for and against its inclusion especially in view of recent renewed interests in the household production literature and to suggest a criterion.