Report

A Measure of Care

How countries strive to move beyond GDP and capture the value of invisible work

Countries’ overreliance on GDP as their main indicator of prosperity misses critical considerations, like essential tasks often done by women in building social capital, volunteering, community engagement, and completing household activities. These aspects of the “care economy” make it possible for society to function but are invisible in GDP reports.

By Livia Bizikova, Vanesa D’Alessandre (CIPPEC), Florencia Caro Sachetti (CIPPEC) on March 4, 2026

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Key Messages

Overall, it is estimated women perform over 16 billion hours of unpaid care work every day through cooking, cleaning, household chores, and attending to the needs of children, the elderly, or sick relatives.
Reducing care to the hours involved often frames it as a burden that takes time away from women—potentially replaceable by market services—rather than recognizing it as the foundational investment upon which the entire economy and society depend.
Given the significant role of care work in national economies and development, integrating care economy indicators into beyond-GDP efforts is essential. However, such practices remain limited, underscoring the need to explore additional types of indicators proposed by the care community.
While established tools like time-use surveys can serve as the cornerstone for capturing care activities, they should not be viewed in isolation. Instead, the current challenge is to move beyond selecting individual tools and toward building a cohesive, integrated system for measuring care.

Various approaches have been proposed to address GDP’s limitations and introduce complementary metrics, such as those that measure the quality of life, environmental sustainability, inequality, labour, health, and social protection metrics. Yet even these systems often fail to fully recognize contributions that are vital to society, particularly those disproportionately carried out by women.

This report explores the care economy and opportunities to integrate it into efforts to move beyond GDP. The authors summarize current approaches to measuring the contribution of care work, using examples from around the world and examining the level of integration of care work and its role in integrating human capital into alternative metrics. They also offer recommended next steps to meaningfully measure the care economy’s contributions within beyond-GDP frameworks.