Measuring Time Poverty and Analyzing Its Determinants: Concepts and Application to Guinea’ in Mark Blackden and Quentin Wodon (eds), Gender, Time Use and Poverty in Sub-Saharan

The availability of better data on time use in developing countries makes it important to provide tools for analyzing such data. Conceptually, time poverty can be understood as the fact that some individuals do not have enough time for rest and leisure after taking into account the time spent working, whether in the labor market, for domestic work, or for other activities such as fetching water and wood. Unlike consumption or income, where economists assume that ‘more is better’, time is a limited resource – more time spent working in paid or unpaid work-related activities means less leisure, and therefore higher ‘time poverty’. This paper provides a simple application of the concepts used in the consumption poverty literature to time use, in order to obtain measures of time poverty for the population as a whole and for various groups of individuals. This work was prepared as a contribution to the Poverty Assessment for Guinea prepared at the World Bank. The authors acknowledge support from the Trust Fund ESSDD as well as the Belgian Poverty Reduction Partnership for research on this issue as part of a small research program on gender, time use and poverty in Sub-Saharan Africa which also benefited from funding from the GENFUND. Preliminary results from the paper were presented at a 3-day workshop organized in Guinea in October 2005 in collaboration with the country’s National Statistical Office (Direction Nationale de la Statistique), and at a World Bank workshop in November 2005. We are grateful to Kathleen Beegle and Mark Blackden for comments. The views expressed here are those of the authors and need not reflect those of the World Bank, its Executive Directors or the countries they represent