Adding Unpaid Care Work into the Analysis of Demographic Dividends

Gretchen Donehower, University of California, Berkeley

Unpaid care work is not usually accounted for in analysis of demographic dividends. At the aggregate level, much of women’s time and a not insignificant amount of men’s time is spent on unpaid household production. This means that a lot of time (productive capacity) is tied up in activities that would return low wages in the market economy. Our analysis demonstrates the impact of time spent in these low productivity activities and implications for the demographic dividend, using examples from a few selected countries.