May 2005

 

 

‘Marketisation’ of home production tasks is necessary if New Zealand aims to draw more mothers into the paid labour force, a US-based economist recently said. 

 

Professor Shelly Lundberg, University of Washington, opened the Treasury’s Workshop on Labour Force Participation and Economic Growth by suggesting that if women with children are the main new source of labour in the paid workforce, then their household production work will need to be replaced by market substitutes.  Chores such as cooking, caring for dependents including animals, community work, and shopping need to be “marketised” to make up for the loss of women’s unpaid contributions to running households, neighbourhoods, and communities.

 

The US leads the way on the marketisation of household goods and services: paying for dog-walking, ready-made food or childcare services can be common in some families.  But what is lost in the quality of these household services has not been usefully measured, Lundberg said.  For example: What is the cost to the health system for what she called the “Big Mac effect”, where a significant portion of a child’s diet is fast food?  What are the measurable implications for a child’s well being when we replace home care by the mother with market-based care by paid caregivers?

 

Lundberg also said that standard national accounts are flawed, and an “incomplete measure of welfare” as they do not include the value of home production.  Once a task or product is paid for in the market however, it moves into the national accounts register as a service or product.  Part of the increase in Gross Domestic Product (GDP) that results from increased employment of mothers, she argues, is illusory, as the measured positive impact on GDP does not factor in the losses to family and personal wellbeing.