Assessing the Impact of Social Care Expansion: Time Use, Employment, and Poverty

In recent years, there has been increased interest in the expansion of social care services in Mexico as well as in other countries. This is due partly to the recognition that the responsibility for unpaid care work, which falls most heavily on women within households, is a major obstacle to women’s labor force engagement. Unlocking this potential labor is thought to be important due to its positive impacts on economic growth, on women’s economic empowerment, or both. The expansion of social provisioning of care services is thus promoted with an eye towards the development goals of economic growth, gender equality, and poverty reduction. Relatively little research has directly examined these linkages between social provisioning of care, the expansion of employment opportunities for women, and growth. Even less attention has been paid to the potential impact of labor force engagement for women’s time use and time poverty.

ONU Mujeres has produced aggregate estimated impacts of three social infrastructure interventions in the system of social provision in Mexico: universal free quality childcare; extended school days for school age children; and provision of universal elder care. In each case the estimates have utilized injections of spending into specific sectors outlined in the reports for each specific intervention, based on the Input-Output table for Mexico. These estimated impacts include the overall cost of each intervention, the aggregate impact on output and employment, as well as the impact on the fiscal balance for the government of Mexico. In a prior phase of this project, we estimated the impacts, both direct and indirect, of the expansion of early childhood education services. In this report, we turn to the estimation of the impacts of the latter two policy proposals, including the direct impacts on the time use of individuals in affected households, as well as the income and time-use impacts of the employment generated by the spending required to provide these services.

In this report, we include details of our analysis of these policies on the distribution of time spent on household care activities, as well as on time and income poverty. We begin with a review of the literature relevant to each of the policies. Then we discuss the methods and data we use for the estimates. Next, we analyze Mexican time-use data to assess how it can be used to predict the direct impact of these policy interventions on time-use patterns of adults in Mexican households. We then move on to estimate the employment changes due to the expansion of social provision of services, the impact on time use due to job creation, and finally the predicted impacts on time and income poverty in Mexico due to each of the policies.