Study of Household Income: An Approach Based on a Broad View of Production

This paper considers the real value of unpaid work. Actual living satisfaction depends not only on market income measured using the current concept of GDP, but also on unpaid household production. We try to estimate broad household income in Japan based on 2011 government estimates. We assume three household life stages, each of which consists of three cases categorized by the spouse’s type of work. The results show that income differences between the three cases were very small and women worked longer hours than men in all household life stages. This reveals a different possible view of income distribution and poverty, in which women are overburdened. We found wage-rate differentials are very large between sexes and between full- and part-time workers in Japan, on which unpaid work estimates are based. Considering this, real effects of broad income on income distribution and married women’s contribution to household income would be greater than we have estimated.