Hidden Socioeconomic Challenges: A Historical Review of the Exclusion of Unpaid Household and Care Work from National Income Accounting

Despite being one of the most prominent and well-known statistics for measuring countries’ economic output, growth, and well-being, the gross domestic product (GDP), its key fundamentals, and its measurement have faced academic scrutiny in recent years in terms of capturing the complexity and diversity of socioeconomic challenges faced by contemporary societies. Among the various criticisms, one is the exclusion of unpaid household and care work that remains a persistent socioeconomic challenge to the modern world. Despite its importance to the economy, unpaid work remains unrecognized, leading to unaddressed socioeconomic challenges. This paper presents a narrative review with a historical and critical perspective to examine the theoretical, conceptual, and practical reasons behind the exclusion. Through the analysis of the academic writings and policy documents, the paper traces the evolution of debates on the exclusion of unpaid work. The paper also examines the efforts to measure and include household work in national income accounting at the academic and organizational levels, which have shaped the methodologies used to compute GDP to reflect the current socioeconomic challenges accurately. In the backdrop of the newly released System of National Accounts (SNA) 2025, which, despite acknowledging the significance of unpaid work for material well-being, keeps the work outside of the core accounts while at the same time expanding the production boundary with the inclusion of the datasets as a new asset category, the paper finds the exclusion of unpaid work shows systematic and institutional gender bias with no sound theoretical justification. On the methodological aspects, the study argues that while there has been progress in terms of time use surveys, their frequent conduct, and the introduction of satellite accounts complementary to the core national account, there is a need for more research to develop the techniques for accurately measuring unpaid work. The paper contributes to the literature by offering an integrated synthesis of the historical evolution of national accounting, conceptual debates on the production boundary, feminist criticism, and institutional developments to explain how the exclusion of unpaid household and care work shapes broader socioeconomic challenges.