Counting Women’s Work in Mauritius: Household Production across the Lifecycle in 2003

Morne Oosthuizen and Kezia Lilenstein ()
Additional contact information
Kezia Lilenstein: University of Cape Town

Working Papers from University of Cape Town, Development Policy Research Unit

Abstract: Gender-disaggregated National Transfer Accounts (NTA) reveal significant differences in labour income across the lifecycle between men and women, the result of its link to the System of National Accounts (SNA) and its designation of non-market services as outside the production boundary. Since females specialise relative to males in nonmarket production, this creates problems when analysing the generational economy from a gender perspective. The National Time Transfer Accounts (NTTA) methodology aims to address this blindspot, by constructing estimates of time spent in household production activities across the lifecycle, valuing this time using a specialist replacement wage and integrating these estimates into standard NTA estimates of production and consumption. This paper applies the NTA and NTTA methodologies to data for Mauritius from 2003, and finds stark differences in labour income for males and females across the lifecycle. It is estimated that aggregate household production is equivalent to 29.0 percent of GDP, with almost three-quarters of this produced by females. The effect of including consumption of household production is to almost triple per capita consumption for infants and almost double consumption for five-year-olds. While narrowing the gender gap in labour income can have a strongly positive effect on the country’s demographic dividend, policies that aim for this outcome should account for the time reallocations needed to ensure an equitable distribution of work across gender and age.

Keywords: Generational economy; National Transfer Accounts; Mauritius; Gender; Women's work; labour (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 37 pages
Date: 2018-10
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hme
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Published in CWW Working Paper Series by the Development Policy Research Unit, October 2018, pages 1-37

Downloads: (external link)
https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5994a30fe4f ... 19711813/CWW+WP7.pdf First version, 2018 (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ctw:wpaper:cwwwp7

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from University of Cape Town, Development Policy Research Unit Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Waseema Petersen ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).