Invisible work, visible limits: Specialist wage data constraints in valuing volunteering

Volunteering constitutes a significant form of non-market production, yet its contribution remains largely absent from official economic statistics, where gross domestic product (GDP) continues to dominate as the main benchmark. To address this gap, the International Labour Organization (ILO) has recommended the use of replacement-cost methods, including specialist wages, as good practice for valuing volunteer work in the context of non-profit satellite accounts. While this method promises greater accuracy and comparability by assigning occupation-specific market wages to volunteer activities, its practical implementation has rarely been examined empirically using real statistical data. Using data from the Czech Republic for 2011–2022, this research note demonstrates that the specialist wage approach faces a double barrier: limited availability and uneven quality of occupational wage data. Public-sector wages are stable and reliable but cover only a narrow share of the workforce, whereas private-sector wages offer broader coverage but remain volatile and inconsistent. The result is a systematic trade-off between stability and coverage, and combining both sectors introduces further distortions. The study provides the first systematic assessment of data barriers affecting the application of specialist wage approaches as recommended in the ILO Manuals and shows why even perfect information on volunteer hours cannot overcome the limitations of weak wage data. Without sufficiently robust occupational wage statistics, the monetary value of volunteering remains difficult to estimate consistently and therefore largely invisible within GDP-centred national accounts.