Shifting From the Home to the Market: Accounting for Women's Work in Taiwan, 1965-1995

Abstract

If one accounts for the shift of women's work from the household to the market during the course of economic development, what does the trajectory of growth and structural change look like? In this paper, I present an accounting of one such shift by looking at the role of women in Taiwanese growth between 1965 and 1995, a thirty-year stretch when an enviable per capita market growth rate of 6.9 percent was accompanied by large increases in female labor force participation. I develop an alternative measure of economic production that accounts for both market and household production in the form of unpaid domestic services provided by women in the home, reevaluating growth over the course of Taiwan's export boom. I find that social services, a category that includes services provided in the market and the home, was the lead employer of Taiwanese labor between 1965 and 1995. Another key finding is that many of the factors driving growth in the market sector also shape growth in the household sector. Despite trend declines in the relative size of the household sector, it has probably continued to grow throughout this period, primarily because of productivity gains in household production and the effects of demographic change. At the core of this conclusion is the assumption that opportunity wages are a fair measure of the monetary value of women's work in the home.