Household Production and National Accounts

National accounts do not measure welfare and do not even have to, for which reason measuring total consumption should be one of the objectives of national accounting. However, total consumption measurements require some extensions of national accounts including the integration of household production. For decades several attempts have been made to estimate the money value of "non-market production" by households. Chadeau & Roy (1986), Goldsmidt-Clermont (1982) and Bonke (1993) contain survey tables of estimates of this production in different countries back to the beginning of this century. However, the figures are not straightaway comparable which is not primarily due to the definition of non-market production, where a norm has gradually been established. The problem is that of choosing appropriate estimating procedures which may establish a framework for comparisons of figures referring to different times and countries. The aim of the present paper is to assign estimations of the value of the Danish household production following the guidelines by Chadeau (1992), and to show some way of integrating household production into national accounts, ending up measuring "gross economic production" (Ironmonger, 1993).