Unpaid care work: calculating its value to the South African economy.

Abstract

All households partake in unpaid care work (UPCW) of varying degrees. This work falls outside of the production possibilities frontier because there is no payment for the products made or services rendered within the unpaid care work category of time use. Systematically does not get accounted in the UN System of National Accounts framework, and therefore, not included in the computation of the GDP index. Consequently, this sector is invisible thereby making it hard for governments to develop and implement policies to support those who engage in it most. This study investigates how unpaid care work contributes to the South African economy. A quantitative approach using a non-experimental research strategy is used to estimate the imputed value of the unpaid care work as a share of GDP without attempting to determine possible causality or correlation between the variables. First, aggregate annual time use for UPCW activity is calculated. Then, the market equivalent wage is estimated for each of the respective UPCW activities. Then, obtaining a product of these produces the imputed value. The imputed value is measured against the GDP figures to estimate unpaid care work’s potential share to GDP. Three datasets: the 2010 Time Use Survey (TUS), the 2010 Quarterly Labour Force Survey (QLFS) and the 2010 Quarterly Gross Domestic Product (QGDP) data are used. The TUS produces the time estimates measuring how much time is spent on paid and unpaid work activities and the QLFS is used to estimate the market-related wages payable for activities of paid work similar to unpaid work. Lastly, the QGDP data is used to compare the contribution of unpaid care work to the South African gross domestic product (GDP). The results of four valuation methods inform that unpaid care work contributed 36.83% using the Economy Wide Mean Wage, 3.87% for Men and 6.89% for Women using the Opportunity Cost method, 25.82% using the Generalist and 26.47% using the Specialist wage methods to the South African real GDP of 2010. The monetary value of the unpaid care work sector for the year 2010, was R 3.97 1.463 trillion using the Economy Wide Mean wage, R153.9 billion for Men and R273 billion for Women when using the Opportunity Cost method, and R1 trillion 26 billion for the Generalist wage method, as well as R1 trillion and 52 billion when using the Specialist Wage method.