The Value of the Household Economy

In the 1981, the value of the economic production by households was estimated by Robert Eisner and his colleagues at Northwestern to total $1,709 billion. That amounted to 37.5 percent of the “extended GNP” of $4,560 billion. In 1998, Redefining Progress, a nonprofit organization based in San Francisco, pegged the value of household work in 1998 at a total of $1.911 trillion – about one quarter the size of the U.S. gross domestic product (GDP) that year.