ACCOUNTING FOR NONMARKET HOUSEHOLD PRODUCTION WITHIN A NATIONAL ACCOUNTS FRAMEWORK U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis

The satellite accounts illustrated in this paper reflect the household's role as a producer and an investor in durables as well as a consumer by modifying the NIPA's to (1) incorporate the value of nonmarket (unpaid) household work into GDP; and (2) treat expenditures on consumer durables as investment and measure the value of the services those durables provide. Additionally, an Input-Output (1-0) model highlights the household's functions as a producer and investor in much greater detail for the year 1992 by incorporating a household industry for each time-use activity and by showing the inputs to and outputs from each household industry's production. The U.S. national income and product accounts (NIPA's) are a system of statistics that present the value of the nation's output, the composition of that output, and the distribution of income generated in its production. Their purpose is to provide a coherent and comprehensive picture of the economic transactions that occur in an accounting period. As useful as this information is, however, the accounts ' focus on the market and market transactions has led to criticism that the accounts fail to consider some important nonmarket forms of production. One long-standing criticism is that the accounts ignore household production