Household Production and Consumption in Finland 2001

In other calculations shown in this report, the value of labour is determined
on the basis of gross hourly wages excluding employer’s social insurance
contributions. In that case unpaid work accounts for 39 per cent of GDP. If
work done by children aged 10–14 were added to the 1990 figures, the GDP
proportion would be around 46 per cent. In spite of minor differences in the
calculations, we may observe that there are only minor, but positive, changes
in the extent of household production in comparison with the rest of the
economy.
The Finnish result, which shows minor positive change in the value of
unpaid work as a proportion of GDP from 1990 to 2001, is in sharp contrast to
international trends. Although the absolute value of unpaid work has gone up
in all countries, many have reported a decrease in its share of GDP over the
past ten years. This suggests that the growth of other production has outpaced
household production, or that wages in jobs equivalent to unpaid work have
developed more slowly than other wages. In Germany the value of unpaid
work as a proportion of GDP in 1992 was 52 per cent, in 2001 the figure was
down to 48 per cent (net wages). In the Basque Country, correspondingly, the
figures were 49 per cent in 1993, 39 per cent in 1998 and 33 per cent in 2003.
In Australia, the value of unpaid work in 1992 was 51 per cent and in 1997 43
per cent of the country’s GDP (Schäfer 2004, Basque Statistics Office 2004,
Trewin 2000).
One possible reason why the value added of household production in
Finland has changed relatively little is that the proportion of people out of
work and outside the labour force has increased sharply from 1990 to 2001. It
has been discovered that unemployed persons do more unpaid work than
those in wage employment. Another possible explanation is that in the
countries just mentioned, women moved into wage employment in greater
numbers in the 1990s than was the case in Finland, where the corresponding
change happened earlier.
The structure of production has changed somewhat. Although calculations
for 1990 and 2001 are not fully comparable, it is interesting to examine the
relationship between labour, the consumption of fixed capital and
intermediate consumption.
Structure of production in non-SNA production, % of total output
1990 2001
Value of labour 76.4 74.2
Taxes minus subsidies – 0.9
Consumption of fixed capital 2.2 4.1
Intermediate consumption 21.4 20.8
Value of output 100.0 100.0
34 Statistics Finland National Consumer Research Centre