Families, Time and Money in Canada, Germany, Sweden, the United Kingdom and the United States

Using microdata from the Luxembourg Income Study, we assess ‘time crunch’ for families with children in Canada, Germany, Sweden, the U.K. and the U.S. Both theory and empirical evidence suggest that both time and money are important inputs to the well-being of parents and children. We present cross-country comparisons of ‘total available adult hours’ under different assumptions about the varying time needs of families of different size. We also present estimates of ‘time shortages.’ In all cases, we provide separate estimates for families located at different points in the country income distributions, since being short of both time and money is likely to be particularly problematic. Although paid work hours are highest for high-income families, we nonetheless find significant numbers of lower-income families in which parents work very long hours in the paid labour market; this is particularly the case in the U.S..