Counting Women’s Work in South Africa: Incorporating Unpaid Work into Estimates of the Economic Lifecycle in 2010

Morne Oosthuizen

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

Abstract: National Transfer Accounts (NTA) have been used to describe the generational economy in countries around the world, including South Africa. However, gender disaggregations highlight the fact that the contributions made particularly by women within the household are invisible, the result of NTA’s link to the System of National Accounts. Women’s economic contribution (i.e. production) is therefore underestimated, giving a false sense of patterns of dependency by gender and age. This paper addresses this issue by constructing National Time Transfer Accounts (NTTA) for South Africa using timeuse and NTA data from 2010, allowing the construction of a more complete picture of total production and consumption across the lifecycle. Based on these estimates, household production is valued at 27.3 percent of GDP in 2010, of which almost three-quarters is contributed by females. While per capita consumption rises at all ages once household production is included, it is more than tripled for infants, revealing that the amajority of the consumption by infants and young children is of non-market services, particularly care. Reducing gender-based differences in labour income is found to have a beneficial impact on both the magnitude and duration of the first demographic dividend.

Keywords: Generational economy; National Transfer Accounts; South Africa; Gender; Women (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 41 pages
Date: 2018-11
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dev and nep-hme
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Published in CWW Working Paper Series by the Development Policy Research Unit, November 2018, pages 1-41

Downloads: (external link)
https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5994a30fe4f ... 92721336/CWW+WP8.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:cwwwp8

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 ).