The Value of Housewives’ Labor Evaluated at Yearly 169 Trillion Won

To what amount of money is it equivalent the household tasks for all family members like laundering and cleaning up a house?

The Ministry of Gender Equality (MOGE) announced on the 28th that domestic families’ `nonpayment household tasks, ` which Ewha Women’s Univ. converted into monetary value, were valued at 143 to 169 trillion won, for which Ewha Univ. worked for 6 months from July 2000. The value is equivalent to 30 to 35.4 percent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) 477 trillion won in 1999.

Choi Man-Ki chief of Policy Development & Evaluation Division in MOGE said, “there so far have been evaluations of the value of housewife’s house keeping labor, but it is for the first time evaluating the value of all family members’ house works. ”

The characteristics of `Satellite Account, ` which was used as a analyzing device for this research, is that it takes the labor and consumption goods for house keeping tasks for investment, quite different from the System of National Accounts (SNA) which excludes household labor from production.

That is to say, it broke the traditional concept, which takes family for the `place of consumption, ` where goods and services produced in market are consumed, and converted the annual added value of household labor taking it as `the producer of service`.

For example, it calculates housewife’s labor and pot as well as rice as added value of cooking rice.

From the statistic by Satellite Account of household labor, one housewife’s housekeeping labor was valued at 560,000 to 640,000 won.

The value of female aged 30s reached 1.11 million won for the most, while that of male 90,000 to 150,000 won.

The result of this research might be used for judging material of policies related with evaluating the value of household labor like for the claim for property division, private insurance and national pension.

Meanwhile, advanced countries like U.S. and Sweden are taking the economic value of household labor valued by SA into account for various policies.

Ho-Gab Lee gdt@donga.com