Simultaneous Determination of Home Work and Market Work of Women in Urban West Africa
| Date | 01 February 1999 |
| Author | Peter Glick |
| Published date | 01 February 1999 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/1468-0084.00116 |
SIMULTANEOUS DETERMINATION OF HOME WORK
AND MARKET WORK OF WOMEN IN URBAN WEST
AFRICA
Peter Glicky
I. INTRODUCTION
Women in both developing and developed countries devote a substantial
amount of time to household work such as childcare and food preparation
while frequently also engaging in income-earning activities. The hours
spent in each of these activities do not represent separate decisions but
rather are outcomes of an optimization process in which allocations of
time to home work, market work, and leisure are jointly determined. Thus
factors that make market work more attractive also in¯uence the time in
home work. Similarly, changes in the demand for a woman's household
labour will affect both her time working in the home and her hours in
market work.
An understanding of the connection between household and market time
allocation decisions can help in identifying constraints on women's partici-
pation in the labour force and in formulating policies to alleviate these
constraints. In developing countries, where a substantial share of the
population may have little access to time-saving appliances and products
such as processed foods, women's entry into the labour force (or their hours
of work if they do participate) may be severely limited by their household
responsibilities. Proponents of government support for programs such as
daycare services argue that such services, by substituting for unpaid work in
the home, would make it easier for women to enter into or engage more
extensively in activities earning a monetary return (Cornia 1987). It is
possible, however, that reductions in household work will be used in part to
increase leisure rather than labour market activity, re¯ecting the heavy
overall work burden women in developing countries typically bear. Many
other public policies are also likely to have signi®cant impacts on female
time allocation. The provision of electricity, for example, may improve the
productivity of labour in both household and market work, altering the time
spent in these activities as well as in leisure.
OXFORD BULLETIN OF ECONOMICS AND STATISTICS, 61, 1 (1999)
0305-9049
57
#Blackwell Publishers Ltd, 1999. Published by Blackwell Publishers, 108 Cowley Road, Oxford
OX4 1JF,UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.
yI am indebted to Julia Lane, David Sahn, Michael Ransom, and an anonymous referee for their
helpful comments.
This paper investigates the determinants of female labour supply in
home and market production in Conakry, Guinea, a large and rapidly
growing urban center in West Africa. The analysis differs from most
previous work on this topic in developing countries in several respects.
First, an empirical approach is taken that recognizes the jointness inherent
in decisions regarding the time allocated to different productive activities.
Hours in market work and hours in home work are modelled as a
simultaneous system using the simultaneous tobit model ®rst discussed by
Amemiya (1974). In previous studies, the determinants of home work and
market labour supply have generally been analyzed separately.1If these
time allocations are jointly determined, however, estimates from single
equation methods, which assume they are independent, may be mislead-
ing.
Second, this study uses urban data, whereas almost all previous
developing country studies of female time use have examined rural
populations. Little is known about how women in urban environments in
poor countries allocate their time, especially with respect to the extent and
determinants of home work. Household structure, the availability of
electricity and processed foods, and labour market incentives can be
expected to be quite different in rural and urban areas, leading to
differences in the division of women's time among market work, home
work, and leisure.
The empirical results presented in this paper indicate that individual and
household characteristics have strong in¯uences on women's time in differ-
ent productive activities in a poor urban area. Years of formal schooling has
non-linear effects on women's market labour supply, becoming positive only
after or near completion of primary school. Having young children raises
the time spent in both home activities and market work, in contrast to child-
related reductions in female market labour supply found in developed
economies. Community infrastructural factors such as transportation costs
and access to electricity also affect allocations of home and market time.
Further, a signi®cant tradeoff is found to exist between time spent in
household work and time in market work. An increase in weekly hours in
one work activity is associated with a reduction in hours in the other activity
as well in leisure time.
The paper is organized as follows. Section II outlines the theoretical
model of time allocation underlying the empirical analysis. Section III
describes the estimation technique. Section IV discusses the data and
variable selection. The estimation results are presented in Section V, which
also includes a discussion of goodness of ®t of the model compared with
alternatives. A ®nal section summarizes the ®ndings and discusses their
implications.
1Exceptions are Alderman and Chishti (1991), Gertler and Newman (1988), and Kiker and
Oliveira (1990).
58 BULLETIN
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