Measuring Time Poverty and Analyzing its Determinants: Concepts and Application to Guinea

Abstract

The availability of better data on time use in developing countries makes it important to provide tools for analyzing such data. Conceptually, time poverty can be understood as the fact that some individuals do not have enough time for rest and leisure after taking into account the time spent working, whether in the labor market, for domestic work, or for other activities such as fetching water and wood. Unlike consumption or income, where economists assume that ‘more is better', time is a limited resource – more time spent working in paid or unpaid work-related activities means less leisure, and therefore higher ‘time poverty''. This paper provides a simple application of the concepts used in the consumption poverty literature to time use, in order to obtain measures of time poverty for the population as a whole and for various groups of individuals.