The Care Economy Is Counted, but Not Yet Budgeted

Executive Summary. Bangladesh's first national Time-Use Survey made visible a labour market that the budget largely treats as free. In 2021, women spent 5.9 hours per day on unpaid care and domestic work, compared with 0.8 hours for men. Men spent 6.1 hours on paid work, while women spent 1.2 hours. Bangladesh then took the next statistical step: BBS, UN Women, and ADB published the country's first official Household Production Satellite Account in 2025. Its hybrid method valued unpaid household production at BDT 6,673 billion, or 18.90% of 2021 GDP, with women supplying 85.37% of the total. The statistical gap is no longer the absence of a first account. The policy gap is using it: Bangladesh should institutionalize regular time-use and household-production accounts, fund care services as economic infrastructure, and test every major budget measure for its effect on unpaid time.

The household begins work before the labour market notices. Food is prepared, children are washed and supervised, water and medicine are arranged, rooms are cleaned, older relatives are assisted, and schedules are coordinated. None of this becomes effortless because it is unpaid. It simply becomes easy to omit from budgets and productivity debates.

Time-use data change the unit of analysis. A labour-force survey asks whether a person worked for pay. A time-use survey asks what filled the day. That second question reveals why a woman may be recorded outside employment even while performing long hours of necessary production. It also reveals why employment alone does not end inequality if the care shift remains intact.

The unpaid day is not a residual category

The Bangladesh Time-Use Survey reports that women spent 5.9 hours per day on unpaid care and domestic work, while men spent 0.8 hours. The summary brief expresses the difference as 7.3 times.

Source: Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics and UN Women, Bangladesh Time-Use Survey 2021.

These hours are not a claim that every woman follows the same schedule. They are averages across a national sample. The survey covered 8,000 households, 17,770 respondents age 15 and above, and all 64 districts. Its breadth makes the gender gap a population pattern rather than an anecdote.

The work has economic consequences even when no wage is attached. It maintains workers, develops children, supports health, and substitutes for purchased services. If households stopped providing it, someone would need to reduce other activity, pay a provider, or accept lower wellbeing. The absence of a market price does not mean the service has no cost. It means the cost is paid in time and foregone choices.

Budgets often compound the omission. A clinic that lacks convenient hours transfers waiting and care to families. A school schedule without safe transport or after-school support transfers supervision. Water, transport, energy, and housing design change the time required to maintain a household. A project can look cheap to the treasury because its hidden operating requirement is supplied by unpaid labour.

Paid work and unpaid work form one time budget

The market-day chart runs in the opposite direction. Men averaged 6.1 hours of paid work per day, compared with 1.2 hours for women. The summary brief describes men as spending 5 times as many hours on paid work.

Source: Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics and UN Women, Bangladesh Time-Use Survey 2021.

This is not evidence that women prefer leisure. The unpaid chart shows where much of the day went. Time is a fixed resource. A long care shift narrows the hours available for travel, job search, training, paid work, rest, and civic participation. It can push women toward home-based, informal, flexible, or low-hour work even when those jobs pay less.

The survey's attitude finding sharpens the contradiction. More than 90% of respondents believed both husband and wife should earn an income. Social approval of women's employment can therefore coexist with a household division of labour that makes employment difficult. Aspiration changes faster than the services and bargaining arrangements needed to realise it.

Employment policy that ignores care may train women for jobs they cannot accept, create workplaces whose hours do not match family needs, or celebrate entry while overlooking exit. The correct unit is the full time budget. A policy succeeds when it expands real choice over paid work and care, not when it adds another obligation to an already full day.

Employers also have a role, but private flexibility is not a substitute for public infrastructure. Predictable schedules, parental leave, safe transport, and childcare support can reduce the penalty. Yet workers in informal or small enterprises may never receive firm-level benefits. A national care system must reach beyond formal payrolls.

The burden peaks when careers and families are built

Among adults aged 25 to 44, women spent 7.1 hours per day on unpaid care and domestic work, compared with 0.9 hours for men. This is the period when experience, earnings, and promotion often accumulate, and when young children or dependent relatives may require intense care.

The timing creates a compounding effect. Missing paid experience today can reduce future wage offers, pension contributions, savings, and bargaining power. A temporary care shock can therefore leave a permanent economic scar. The household may make a rational short-run decision for the lower earner to withdraw, while past inequality helps determine who the lower earner is.

This mechanism also changes how social protection should be designed. A cash benefit may relieve expenses without relieving time. A childcare service can release hours but may be inaccessible if transport is unsafe or hours are unreliable. Support for older people and persons with disabilities can reduce intense household burdens that childcare programmes alone miss.

Care policy must be a portfolio. It includes early-childhood services, community and home-based support, disability assistance, elder care, water and energy access, safe mobility, school schedules, health-system navigation, and leave. The correct mix differs across places. Time-use data can show which burdens are large and which groups carry them.

The survey is an older benchmark and was collected during the pandemic period. Household routines may have changed. That is an argument for repeating the survey, not for discarding it. A single measurement reveals the structure. Repeated measurement shows whether policy changed it.

Bangladesh has an account; the next test is whether budgets use it

BBS, UN Women, and ADB published Bangladesh's first official Household Production Satellite Account in 2025, using the 2021 time-use evidence. Depending on the replacement-cost method, the report values unpaid household production from 14.03% to 21.88% of GDP. Its hybrid estimate is 18.90%, equal to BDT 6,673 billion, with women contributing 85.37%. Bangladesh has therefore crossed the first accounting threshold: unpaid production is no longer merely proposed or statistically invisible.

Source: BBS, UN Women and ADB, Unpaid Household Production Satellite Account of Bangladesh, 2025.

Valuation needs care. Replacement-cost methods ask what it would cost to hire someone for the task. Opportunity-cost methods ask what the unpaid worker could have earned. These approaches answer different questions and can produce different totals. A single headline value can create false precision.

Future accounts should continue to publish methods, ranges, tasks, time quantities, and sensitivity. Their purpose is not to claim that affection or family relationships are market transactions. It is to prevent necessary labour from disappearing because no cash changed hands, and to show whether policy reduces or redistributes that labour over time.

Budget analysis can use time even before a monetary account is final. Each major programme can ask whether it raises or lowers unpaid hours, for whom, and through which service. A water project that saves collection time has an economic return beyond the tariff. A clinic process that shifts queues onto attendants has a hidden cost. Time incidence should sit beside fiscal incidence.

The updated action plan described in the summary brief covers 48 ministries. That breadth is appropriate because care is not owned by a single ministry. It is shaped by education, health, transport, water, housing, social protection, labour, and local government. The coordinating mechanism must prevent the issue from becoming everyone's responsibility in principle and no one's budget line in practice.

The counterargument: household care is private choice

The strongest objection says families, not the state, should decide how to divide care. Some people value caring for relatives directly, and public programmes can be costly, inflexible, or culturally mismatched. Measuring time should not become a mandate that every household adopt the same arrangement.

That objection protects an important freedom. Care policy should expand choice, not replace family relationships. But a choice made without affordable services, safe transport, reliable hours, or shared responsibility is constrained. The survey's large and persistent gender difference suggests more than diverse preference. It shows a patterned allocation of unpaid obligation.

Public policy already shapes the choice. It decides school hours, clinic access, leave rules, infrastructure, and social assistance. Omitting care does not keep the state neutral. It leaves the existing burden where it falls. The relevant question is whether policy makes alternatives available and whether men, employers, communities, and public services share responsibility.

Another objection is fiscal space. Bangladesh cannot build every care service at once. That makes measurement and prioritisation more valuable. Programmes should start where time burdens are high, service models are feasible, and labour-market or wellbeing gains can be tested. Evidence should guide scaling.

Three moves to put care inside economic policy

1. Institutionalize the household-production account as a recurring statistical product. Owner: Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics. Success signal: regular releases update unpaid-care hours and valuation ranges by sex, age, location, employment, and task, with the 2021 pandemic-period benchmark kept distinct from later vintages.
2. Fund care as infrastructure, then measure time saved. Owner: Ministry of Finance with sector ministries and local governments. Success signal: childcare, elder support, disability services, water, transport, and health programmes report their effect on unpaid hours and access, not only facilities or enrolment.
3. Audit budgets for time incidence. Owner: Finance Division and Ministry of Women and Children Affairs. Success signal: major budget proposals state whose unpaid work rises or falls, and programmes that transfer hidden labour to households must disclose and mitigate that cost.

Bangladesh does not need to turn every act of care into a commodity. It needs to stop treating care as costless. Once time enters the budget lens, policies that save unpaid hours become productive investment, and employment policy begins from the full day rather than the paid fragment. The care economy is already here. The task is to count it, share it, and design around it.

---

Data note: the Time-Use Survey was collected in 2021 during the pandemic period and is treated as an older benchmark. The 2025 satellite account applies three replacement-cost methods to that benchmark; its values are analytical extensions of national accounts, not additions to conventional GDP. Sources retrieved 2026-08-23.

Sources

1. UN Women Data Hub, Bangladesh Time-Use Survey 2021: https://data.unwomen.org/publications/bangladesh-time-use-survey-2021
2. Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics and UN Women, Bangladesh Time-Use Survey 2021 Summary Brief: https://data.unwomen.org/sites/default/files/documents/Publications/2024/Bangladesh_TUS-Summary-Brief_0524.pdf
3. Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics, UN Women and Asian Development Bank, Unpaid Household Production Satellite Account of Bangladesh, 2025: https://bangladesh.un.org/sites/default/files/2025-09/UN%20Women%20%26%20BBS%20Report.pdf