STEG Working Paper Series Research Theme 2: Labour, Home Production, and Structural Transformation at the Level of the Household, Cross-Cutting Issue 1: Gender

Time use and household welfare in a structurally changing society: the case of Ghana

WP118_Agyei-Homes_Asante-Poku_Atta-Ankomah_Time use and Household Welfare in Ghana.pdf

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Citation

Agyei-Homes, A., Asante-Poku, N. and Atta-Ankomah, R. (2025). "Time use and household welfare in a structurally changing society: the case of Ghana". STEG Working Paper.

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The Ghanaian society is changing in ways which shifts labour to formal and informal employment in the services sector. What is not clear is whether the time which households spend on housework could create an inertia, conceptually, and prevent them from earning incomes which in turn influences their consumption poverty. In this paper, we use three rounds of a nationally representative household socio-economic survey to analyse the dynamics of time use for housework among different groups of household members in an admittedly structurally changing Ghanaian society to find out how time commitments to housework influences household welfare measured as consumption poverty. Means and proportions are used by the study to investigate the average time used by different sub-groups in our study on different housework activities. In addition, Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) regression approaches in the panel framework is also relied on to examine the factors which drive time use for housework and how time poverty influences consumption poverty. This approach and the nationally representative panel data allow us to learn how time poverty affects consumption poverty in a dynamic way. First, households in general spend one fifth of their time on housework per day and this has remained robust in all the three rounds of survey. However, females and rural dwellers spend more time on housework than males and urban dwellers respectively. Second, important drivers of time use for housework include the lag values of time use, whether the respondent is in paid employment, age of the respondent and the locality in which the household is found.  Finally, the relationship between consumption poverty and time poverty was found to be generally negative. This suggests that households which spend more time on housework are not necessarily consumption poor. The results of this analysis offer insights into key factors influencing time use for housework. The study underlines fact that being a woman or a rural dweller increases the amount of time you spend on housework – which could potentially limit the opportunity for labour market participation. This calls for labour saving technologies which can help reduce the burden on household members in carrying out housework.

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