India needs time-use data for public health management
The study has been authored by Dr Soumyadip Roy, associate professor of Economics & assistant dean, Jindal School of Banking & Finance, O.P. Jindal Global University
The Covid-9 pandemic has changed everything around us, including how we spend time. Since the first lockdown started in India, we have been spending a large amount of time, if not all, at home. The way we work, shop for essentials or even look after our children have all changed. These changes have significant impacts not only on our physical and mental health, but also on the economy, the environment and society at large. For example – while work from home reduces travel time and associated negative externalities due to pollution, it results in strained home resources, which can affect intra-family relationships.
Studying time allocation choices made by people can be useful for policymakers. The gender gap in earnings across countries and across industries is well known. What is lesser known is that there exists a large gender gap in time devoted towards leisure, personal care, studying and care work. A famous study Mark Aguiar and Erik Hurst, labour economists from the United States, found that although Americans are consuming more leisure time over the last five decades, men consume more leisure time than women. This result has been confirmed for many other countries. Such insights can have powerful consequences in understanding social inequality.
Prof Peter Orazem, labour economist at Iowa State University, and I looked at how time allocated towards leisure activities and health might affect each other. We used time-use data of Americans from 2006 to 2008 and 2014 to 2016 and found that all types of leisure are not the same – some (running, swimming, playing sports) are consumed more by people with better health while some others (television viewing, playing computer games etc.) are consumed more by people with worse health. In fact there is also a relationship between these two types of leisure and income. Higher income is associated with higher consumption of leisure activities which are physically active in nature and the reverse is true for sedentary leisure activities.
Economists have written quite a bit on how people make time-allocation choices and how it affects the economy. Starting with seminal work by Nobel-prize winning economist Gary Becker, how people choose how much time to spend on an activity has been something that has intrigued economists and social scientists. In particular, the market wage has drawn a fair amount of attention since wage represents the opportunity cost of time. What does the market wage have to do with time? Let us consider the example of Rohan, a fast-food worker who is paid per hour of work. Rohan wakes up on a Monday morning and decides not to go to work – instead, he chooses to spend his day sitting on his couch and watching TV. While Rohan has the right to do whatever he wishes with his time, the decision to forego a day of work costs him a day of wages. This is why wages are the ‘opportunity cost’ of time.
While wages are certainly a key economic variable affecting people’s choices in the labor market, nonmarket activities such as leisure, housework and childcare are also interesting to look at. Also, the way people choose to allocate time towards these nonmarket activities have severe implications on their health. We looked at the American Time Use Survey (ATUS) which collects data on how Americans spent time during a particular day. This data is collected via telephonic interview for adults above 15 years of age. The richness of the data enables researchers to study various patterns in time allocation behaviour and how these choices affect earnings, health and many other measures of well-being. Our study examined how people choose to spend their leisure time and how that choice affects their health.
It is well-known that physical exercise and health are positively related. Similarly, it is well-known that sedentary lifestyle along with consumption of processed food is related to obesity and other negative health outcomes. For example, if someone exercises regularly, it is likely that they will be in good health. The reverse is also true such that, if someone is in good health then they are quite likely to exercise regularly. Similarly, television viewing and other sedentary activities such as playing computer games are likely to be associated with worse health. It is also likely that other demographic variables such as education, age, gender are important factors in how these time-allocation choices affect health.
In our study, we test this hypothesis using ATUS data and find that physically active leisure is a normal good whose demand rises with education and health, while physically passive leisure is an inferior good whose demand rises with lower education and poorer health. Based on their associations with health, we are able to categorise various leisure activities into ‘active’ and ‘passive’ groups. This categorisation helps get a more nuanced understanding of how leisure works, particularly with regard to its relationship with health.
In India, time use data is not available to the extent it is required for such rich, insightful analysis. The National Sample Survey Office (NSSO) has recently collected time use data for the first time from January to December 2019. This data although currently available, is largely unexplored. In fact, there are no major studies that have analysed the time allocation choices of Indians to get a better understanding of the reasons Indians choose to spend their time in the ways that they do, to the best of my knowledge.
The collection of Indian time-use data at regular intervals and its analysis will surely help us understand trends and patterns in human behaviour in India. Insights from such data can have many uses – health, education, gender norms and many other economic variables can be better understood by analysing such data. The ATUS respondents are a subset of the Current Population Survey (CPS), which collects data on many labor market variables and is the primary source of information on labor related variables in the United States. Researchers can link the two datasets and conduct rich analyses on many questions related to the functioning of the labor market. There is an urgent need to collect such data, link them across surveys and analyse them in the Indian context, something that will help our policymakers device more targeted and effective programs aimed at improving the well-being of our citizens.
After all, the way we choose to spend our time is a conscious choice we make and these choices reveal a lot about who we are as a country.
A link to the paper can be accessed by clicking here
(The study has been authored by Dr Soumyadip Roy, associate professor of Economics & assistant dean, Jindal School of Banking & Finance, O.P. Jindal Global University)