Household Production and Economic Efficiency: Arguments for and against Domestic Specialization

Increasing labour force participation by successive cohorts of mothers in post-war Britain has brought about a change in women's economic role, because they no longer specialize completely in domestic activities, except for a relatively short period associated with childrearing. By contrast, men continue to specialize in paid work, taking little responsibility for household tasks. Economic argument and sociological evidence are brought together in this paper to suggest that the demands of economic efficiency no longer require household members to specialize between domestic and market tasks. This idea runs counter to the major recent theory of economic demography, the socalled `new home economics', in which specialization (within marriage, though not necessarily by sex) is of crucial importance because of the particular way in which productivity is assumed to improve as more time is devoted to an activity. The nature of the returns to time spent at domestic and market activities is examined here in some detail — for example it is suggested that experience accrues more to participation in an activity than from the scale of that activity, and empirical evidence from various sources would appear to support this. The implication is that resources may not currently be allocated efficiently, and the paper concludes with a discussion of the factors which may hinder the achievement of efficiency, and how these might be overcome.