Intergenerational transfers in form of unpaid work in Slovenia

Joze Sambt, University of Ljubljana
Janez Malacic, University of Ljubljana

Recently the new method called National Transfer Accounts (NTA) has been developed to measure economic flows across age groups. The NTA comprehensively analyse economic flows from age groups with lifecycle surpluses to age groups with lifecycle deficits. Among the private transfers only the production and consumption that are paid are taken into account. By omitting unpaid work from the analysis we are missing a large part of the production and consequently the transfers between age groups. In this article we supplement basic NTA results for Slovenia with the unpaid work. We build on the micro data from the latest time use survey for Slovenia conducted in 2000 2001. Preliminary result show that people in Slovenia spend in average about 4 hours per day on unpaid work, which is close to the amount of time that people spend on paid work. The decomposition by gender shows that women in Slovenia provide about three times as much unpaid work as men. This is surprising result in light of high employment rates of women in Slovenia that is inherited from socialist times. Therefore we would expect smaller differences between male and female regarding the unpaid work. However, it turns out that females’ higher enrolment in unpaid work is compensated through considerably less leisure in age 25 to 50 years. The results confirm our hypothesis that beside the paid work also the unpaid work is very important component of the total production and consumption and therefore it should not be ignored in the NTA analysis. Results also confirm that unpaid work is not uniformly distributed across all ages. There are large transfers of unpaid work flowing from adults to the children, especially the youngest ones, and in smaller extent also to the elderly in highest age groups.