First Meeting Notes
Tuesday, June 8
General meeting to discuss where teams are at estimating NTA by gender or doing research on time use. Please edit directly or use comment form at bottom of page.
- Sweden (Christer Rosén, Charlotte Forsell) – no time use research yet but they have done full NTA by gender; expected result that women give least and get most; used equivalence scale assumed between male and female. Possible to get the actual data for public consumption and transfers.
??? what about data driven methods for allocating consumption? Regression methods or iterative methods, just like we do to guess at within-household age allocations???
- Uruguay (Marisa Bucheli, Cecilia González) – no disaggregation by gender but they have time use survey that is supplement to household survey of ’07. Survey has macro value of home production using 3 different methods (same as in Thailand). 1. Opportunity cost of time but there are some issues with that – having a phd doesn’t make me better at cleaning the kitchen 2. Market wage for similar activities 3. ?? I didn’t quite understand this one. Comment – equilibrium argument. Balance between public and private flows between gender. If women get more in private side and give less, then public side should balance that out.
EXPAND MORE ON WHAT IS AT STAKE IN THIS ISSUE? CAN SOMEONE REPORT ON WHAT IS IN THE LITERATURE ABOUT THIS?
- Finland (Risto Vaittinen)– haven’t done NTA by gender yet, or used time use; but they have done generational accounts (GA) which always includes gender but it isn’t stressed. So, public sector methods for separating gender well established in GA.
- Nigeria (Adedoyin Soyibo) – want to get this right (including unpaid work) because women’s contribution is not valued. How to implement? Satellite account.
ISSUE: COST VERSUS PRICE? IN A CONTEXT WHERE GOV’T DETERMINES THE MARKET? HOW TO VALUE HEALTH CARE/TIME USE?
- Australia (James Rice) – there are many things in NIPA now that are not determined in the market (subsistence agriculture, services of owned home). Several countries have estimates of household production (Australia, Uruguay, others?) as a satellite account which exist already and could be used by NTA. Reviewing how to value labor as the wage for people who do similar things – different hourly wages for different types of activity (find wage of people who do it for $) OR use the wage of an occupation of someone who does similar things (like general housekeeper wage applies to all domestic production) OR for complete comparability you should value the OUTPUT instead of the INPUT i.e. the cost of an hour of childcare isn’t the wage rate of the person taking care of my kid, it’s the cost I PAY for the hour (which includes center profit, capital inputs to daycare, etc.) Also makes the point that including time use is not just about gender, it’s about including all types of productive activity.
- Hungary (Róbert Gál) – like’s James’ pointing out that you need time use to get age right, not just to get gender right. Asymmetry between care of children and care of elderly - care for elderly can be bought almost completely in the market or almost all paid for by government, but young children still need a lot of parental input. Much care of children is still largely taking place in household. That is the Hungary project’s motivation – want to calculate the full cost of raising children (now we just include consumption, but also want LABOR inputs to them as well. Compare households with and without children in household budget survey to infer time costs (residual method) then have to value the time by some method. Many methodology issues!
- Taiwan (Nicole Mun Sim Lai) – Taiwan team wants to examine gender aspect of education spending and bequests. Lots of variation in gender preference in bequest s by culture (Thai bequests often go to youngest daughter, many others to oldest son.)
- Indonesia (Maliki) – lots of interest in gender aspect of government activity so data is already there, but would like to add private. Gender differences in bequests by religion, also: Islamic rule that sons get twice the amount of daughters.
- Slovenia/Austria (Joze Sambt) – thinking about aggregate controls by gender. There have been efforts to develop national accounts for other unpaid things (labor, environment). Not sure about data availability of time use surveys for Slovenia and Austria.
- Turro (East-West Center) – interested in places where there is no time use survey data. Can we use things like calorie attributions? Use of food comparison of consuming staple foods versus other supplementary foods in that context. RAND Family Life Survey, done in many countries, has lots of items by gender.
- China (Yu Jiang) – Working on gender differences by urban/rural status. Have found a great deal of equality in opportunity for schooling. Combination of lots of social pressure to send girls to school and also one child policy. BUT in labor market, there’s bi g difference between men and women in rural areas, but not in urban. Migration is a big issue here – men go to urban area to work for most of the year, women stay home and take care of children and elderly.
- Ian Salas (Philippines) – wants to focus on aggregate controls; how to value things in order to be similar to NIPA estimates. Philippines has pilot surveys but just in some communities, not for whole country. Big gender component to overseas labor migration – early on males went to Middle East, later on females went overseas to be domestic workers. Big impact on living arrangements and care of dependents depending on who migrates.
- Japan (Riki Matsukura) – Japanese team has worked with time use survey. Have estimates of time spent in “care” but no data on who receives the care. How to incorporate into NTA framework? Also lots of public sector issues. Household taxation instead of individual taxation creates different work incentives for spouse with lower human capital.
- Kenya (Moses Muriithi,Germano Mwabu) – In regular NTA, dealing with the problem of informal sector allocations.