This Master’s Thesis examines the allocation of individuals’ working time between paid and unpaid work, and thus between workplace and home in eight European countries. Time-geographical theory, where an individual’s activities are affected by constraints to activity, forms the theoretical framework. Classification of countries into the Nordic, Continental, British, and Peripheral welfare state regimes represent the authority constraint in time geography. An individuals’ decision to retire is taken as an event in lifetime allocation of working time between home and the workplace.
A common concern in European economies over the demographic ageing of the population and the decreasing labour force participation of the ageing has prompted research aimed at a better understanding of retirement behaviour. In this work, data from national time use surveys are used in the documentation of time use in Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, Germany, the Netherlands, Portugal, and the United Kingdom. An economic value is assigned to the time spent in household work, and financial incentive calculations for the decision to retire are performed.
There are differences in time use with respect to employment status, gender, and country. The non-employed spend more time at home and supply more household work than the employed. Women supply more household work than men do, regardless of employment status, but the allocation is more equal among the non-employed. Respectively, men supply more paid work than women do. Thus the female share of total work is close to 0.5 in most countries. The results from the financial incentive calculations for the decision to retire indicate that accounting for the value of household work yields stronger incentives to retire, and that household work encourages early retirement in all of the countries included in the study.
The time use patterns do not seem to follow the welfare regime typology very closely. Thus the time-geographical authority constraints in individual countries seem to work fairly independently of each other despite the ongoing convergence in social and economic factors in the European welfare states. However, measures of dissimilarity between pairs of countries do suggest some grouping with respect to location within the core or the periphery of Europe.
Linking descriptive analysis of time use and incentive calculations inclusive of the value of household work to the time-geographical framework illustrates the applicability of time-geographical concepts and methodology in comparative economic geography. This study contributes to an international research project Ageing, Health, and Retirement in Europe, and has been carried out at the Research Institute of the Finnish Economy where the author has been employed as a research assistant during the course of the work.
