This PhD project investigates how households with varying characteristics allocate their money and time across activities spanning the 24 hours of the day. The first part of the project systematically reviews studies that detail households’ activities within input-output tables. These tables, which form part of a country’s national accounts, illustrate the flow of inputs to and outputs from activities within an economy, also making them valuable for environmental footprint accounting. The review highlights several benefits of incorporating detailed household activities, alongside market activities, from economic, social, and environmental perspectives.

The next part addresses key issues identified in the systematic review. It develops a methodology that details activities and expands traditional measures of production to include household production, such as meal preparation. This approach completes the representation of activities and extends measures of production in input-output tables. Results from the UK show that the composition and amount of time and money, both directly and upstream, to households’ final consumption activities depend notably on household income, expanding standard measures of inequality.

The final part addresses the lack of updated time use and household expenditure data in many low- and middle-income countries. It examines the comparability of, and association between, time use and household expenditure patterns across up to 19 countries. Understanding households’ activity patterns at a cross-country level is important from a developmental perspective and for creating complete input-output tables in countries with outdated data. The findings reveal that country of residence remains an important determinant of time use and expenditure patterns when controlling for household characteristics.

The developed methods and analyses contribute to a project called Getting the Data Right that develops a detailed and updated climate footprint analyser, covering many countries, which in the future will detail household activities.

Please email Sofia Topcu Madsen sofiatm@plan.aau.dk to get a copy of the thesis.