Counting Women's Work in South Africa: Estimates of Household Production across the Lifecycle in 2000

National Transfer Accounts’ (NTA) overt link to the System of National Accounts means that non-market services are rendered invisible in our conventional estimates of the generational economy. This is particularly problematic from the perspective of gender analyses of NTAs, since women allocate more time to producing non-market services than men. Thus, our assessment of the generational economy using gender-disaggregated NTAs may be misleading, particularly with respect to patterns of dependency. This paper applies the National Time Transfer Accounts (NTTA) methodology to South African data for 2000 to integrate estimates of household production into the gender-disaggregated NTAs to derive profiles of total economy production and consumption. The results value household production at 29.8 percent of GDP, while revealing significant gender specialisation in productive activities across the lifecycle. The total consumption of young children is found to be 2.0 to 4.5 times their market consumption, a fact that has important implications in terms of understanding decisions around fertility and for policy aimed at increasing women’s economic participation.