Measures of Unrecorded Economic Activities in Fourteen Countries

Part of the goods and services consumed by the population are produced and consumed without undergoing monetary transactions; this non-monetised consumption and the corresponding productive activities go unrecorded in labour statistics and in the national accounts. This is so, for instance, for the goods and services provided to the household by unpaid household members ; S. Kuznets already pointed out in the 1930s, that "housewives' services" (as they were called at the time) constituted the largest single item left out of the national accounts. Other unrecorded economic activities include repairs of household premises and equipment, basket making, weaving, knitting, sewing, etc. for own-consumption . The data presented in this paper show the order of magnitude of the unrecorded economic activity : measured in hours of work, it is, in industrialised countries, as large as the recorded activity.