IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/taf/cnpexx/v26y2021i1p20-35.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Hidden in Plain Sight: Unpaid Household Services and the Politics of GDP Measurement

Author

Listed:
  • Daniel DeRock

Abstract

Gross domestic product (GDP) is one of the world’s most influential and widely cited economic indicators. However, outside of the industrialised, market-based context in which the indicator was first designed, GDP measurement suffers from a number of biases and blind spots. The article zooms in on one of these: the exclusion of unpaid household services from the production boundary of the System of National Accounts, the international standard underpinning GDP methodology. While GDP has expanded over time to include activities as diverse as financial services and the informal sector, the treatment of unpaid household services has remained unchanged. Why is this? I find that staff in the statistical departments of international organisations such the United Nations, International Monetary Fund and World Bank have a tremendous degree of agency in the governance of GDP. While these statisticians are aware of and engage with criticisms, they reject the inclusion of unpaid household services based on shared professional norms and economic ideas.

Suggested Citation

  • Daniel DeRock, 2021. "Hidden in Plain Sight: Unpaid Household Services and the Politics of GDP Measurement," New Political Economy, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 26(1), pages 20-35, January.
    • Handle: RePEc:taf:cnpexx:v:26:y:2021:i:1:p:20-35
    DOI: 10.1080/13563467.2019.1680964
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/13563467.2019.1680964
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1080/13563467.2019.1680964?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Humphries, Jane, 2023. "Respectable standards of living: the alternative lens of maintenance costs, Britain 1270-1860," Economic History Working Papers 119284, London School of Economics and Political Science, Department of Economic History.
    2. Zuazu-Bermejo, Izaskun, 2024. "Reviewing feminist macroeconomics for the XXI century," ifso working paper series 30, University of Duisburg-Essen, Institute for Socioeconomics (ifso).
    3. Sebastian Gechert, 2022. "Reconsidering macroeconomic policy prescriptions with meta-analysis [Statistical nonsignificance in empirical economics]," Industrial and Corporate Change, Oxford University Press and the Associazione ICC, vol. 31(2), pages 576-590.
    4. Humphries, Jane, 2024. "Careworn: the economic history of caring labor," LSE Research Online Documents on Economics 122725, London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:taf:cnpexx:v:26:y:2021:i:1:p:20-35. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Chris Longhurst (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.tandfonline.com/cnpe20 .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.