The Relationship Between Gni and Time

Abstract

  With the data set on time using in developed and developing countries,we try to investigate the relationship between paid work time and gross national income(GNI) and the relationship between paid work time and the growth rate of GNI.The data set we found contains both time-series and cross-sectional observations,which is panel data .Thus,the method that we apply to quantitative analysis is panel data analysis .

1. Introduction

   Time-use is about how people allocate their time during an average day.Time-use research reveal some hidden information of individual activity and time budget (how much of each activity) of individual.In addition,though nearly every country tracks their national income,the output of unpaid work and leisure time activities ,which is an important proportion of market income,is usually neglected in the traditional way of measuring market income.Moreover,time-use survey,with given the daily pattern,leads to better understanding of the contribution of paid work.Adding leisure time use into consideration,it is better to track the lifestyle,level of education or health of different individual,which is useful to analyze social problem or welfare problem.

   The survey of time-use is so practical that it contributions to addressing many issues of politic,economy and culture.In economic field,the former research mostly concentrates on the relationship between time-use and welfare issues,and partly national economic accounting and digital economy.Until now, it seems that no one do some research on the relationship between paid work time and GNI and the relationship between paid work time and the groweth rate of GNI ,which is the most important issue that we try to illustrate in this paper.Moreover,we also try to discover the possible difference of these relationship in developing and developed countries.

The phenomena that people in some countries,for instance,Denmark or Norway,they spend less time in working ,comparing to some developing countries,but their GNI are much more higher than the developing countries’,attracts our attention.This situation leads to our consideration of the relationship between paid work time and economy.It is widely accepted that “hard work pays off”.And in developing countries,such as China,people are hard-working,but pay less off.This issue confused us that less work pays more off  than hard work,which is paradoxical,which is the reason why we choose this issue to research.

In our analytical model,we use two variables ,which are GNI and paid work time.The reason why we choose GNI but not GDP to represent the level of economy is that GNI is the most common measure of the overall level of domestic economic activities.It is more representative to use GNI to reflect the real total income in a country.In addition,in usual time-use research,unpaid work time and leisure time are considered ,however,we build our model without using these two variables,because we fail to find out continuous data set in both developing and developed countries.With the data set,it is not feasible to solve any questions.Thus,we just have to use paid work time to analyze this issue.