Social production as a contextual exposure
Social production varies across populations and over time. Whether that context predicts a person's wellbeing and healthy-longevity outcomes, over and above their own social engagement, is an open question.
Flagship program
Social Production
The unpaid care, volunteering, mentoring, civic participation, and stewardship that sustain communities also keep the formal economy running, yet none of it is counted in GDP. Social production estimates the value of this contribution and expresses it in a form ready for integration into the national accounts, so that it can be monitored, governed, and strengthened.
What it is
Social production is the unpaid work that sustains the social, civic, and environmental fabric of a country: a grandparent caring for grandchildren so their parents can work, a retiree mentoring a young apprentice, neighbours organising support when a family or a whole region is in trouble, people restoring a wetland or running a community space. These are productive activities, not leisure or private consumption, and businesses, public services, and the wider economy depend on them. Social production places a monetary value on this contribution.
GDP was built in the mid-twentieth century to measure market production, for a moment that called for managing recovery and mobilising industry, and it has done that job well. But the boundary of what GDP counts has never been fixed. It has been redrawn many times as the economy changed, each revision bringing a previously uncounted form of production into view. Unpaid social contribution still sits outside that boundary, which leaves the picture of a nation's productive capacity incomplete. Social production is the next step in that long evolution, not a replacement for GDP but an extension of it.
The method is deliberately straightforward. Time-use survey data records how many hours people spend on each kind of social contribution, broken down by demographic group. Those hours are scaled to the population and valued at a single economy-wide median hourly wage. Using one rate keeps the valuation neutral and avoids embedding existing market distortions such as the gender pay gap, and the low pay attached to much of the care, health, and education work, locking in the very undervaluation the measure exists to reveal.
The eight categories
- 01 Volunteering, charity work, and community services
- 02 Unpaid education and care of children
- 03 Unpaid care of older people and those with illness or disability
- 04 Unpaid contribution to knowledge that is free to consume — providing a crowd service
- 05 Unpaid contributions to the creative arts
- 06 Building civic infrastructure
- 07 Environmental guardianship, restoration, or rewilding
- 08 Unpaid informal training and mentoring
Why it matters
Social production builds and maintains the social and environmental foundations that a country's economic and social prosperity depends on. Because social production is not routinely measured, it stays invisible in budget and policy decisions, and is taken for granted until the costs emerge in formal systems. Measurement will change that.
- 01 Measuring social production informs policy that affects both economic and social prosperity.
- 02 It supports fiscal sustainability under mounting budget pressure from rising care demand, aging populations, and slowing productivity growth.
- 03 It works as an early-warning signal when social infrastructure is weakening.
- 04 It shows where social capacity is strong or thin across demographic groups and regions.
- 05 It supports the case for investing in the infrastructure that enables social production and builds community cohesion.
- 06 It aligns with international commitments to measure progress beyond GDP, including the 77th World Health Assembly resolution to build Economies for Health for All, and the UN Pact for the Future.
A method already in use
Social production is no longer only a theoretical proposal. It has been valued nationally in Australia, the United States, and Norway, and implementation work is now under way in Switzerland and Japan. It has also been estimated at the organisational level, recognising the social value that organisations contribute to communities but that standard reporting misses. The method is documented in a peer-reviewed paper in Nature Mental Health (2023) and in a practical handbook for national statisticians, developed with an international research consortium.
Efforts are underway to establish social production satellite accounts that build on time-use data countries already collect, beginning as an experimental measure and becoming an established official statistic reported alongside GDP over time. This work is developing through an international collaboration with universities, statistical agencies, and research funders.
If you work in government, official statistics, philanthropy, or an organisation that wants to measure its own contribution, we would love to hear from you.
New research
Opening new research streams
Brain health, mental health, and biological ageing are shaped by the social conditions in which people live, and social production helps sustain those conditions. Measuring it opens several lines of new research.
Reform of economic evaluation
Health-economic models count lost market productivity, such as absenteeism, presenteeism, and premature mortality, but not lost social productivity. Because people shift from market to social contribution as they age, this can undervalue healthy-ageing interventions and distort what gets funded.
Investment in social infrastructure
Does investment in social capital infrastructure raise and more evenly distribute social production, and through it improve population health? This question can be answered once social production is measured regularly and at sufficient regional and demographic detail.
Key publications and reports
The foundational papers, the national reports, and the policy briefings carrying the program forward.
Social production and the Mental Wealth of nations
Estimating the Mental Wealth of Nations: Valuing social production and investment
The foundational paper introducing social production as a macroeconomic measure of the value of unpaid socially productive work.
Basis for national estimates now in use across Australia, the US, and Norway, Switzerland, and Japan.
Report or briefing
The Value of Social Production in Norway
A national estimate of the monetary value of unpaid socially productive work in Norway.
Launched at the World Economic Forum in Davos.
Social production and the Mental Wealth of nations
Valuing caregiving is a prerequisite for the wellbeing economy and mental wealth
Reframes caregiving for and by older adults as economic production that healthy aging and the wellbeing economy depend on, and that national accounting should capture.
Report or briefing
The Value of Social Production in the United States
A first national estimate of social production in the United States, produced with the Reform for Resilience Americas Hub at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.
Found women, people over 65, and the unemployed to be the largest contributors to social production.
Report or briefing
Europe’s Path Beyond GDP: Monetising Social Production
A briefing prepared for the European Commission on why previous beyond-GDP measures have struggled to gain policy traction, and how a monetised measure of social production, built into the national accounts, offers a workable alternative.
Sets out a path for Europe to establish Social Production Satellite Accounts alongside GDP.
Social production and the Mental Wealth of nations
Governing the social production of care: the hidden foundation of health systems
Health systems rely on unpaid care that is poorly measured and governed. We argue that unpaid care, and the wider social production system behind it, is a productive input whose breakdown drives avoidable admissions, delayed discharge, and labor-force exit. We propose a national accounting framework, a diagnostic lens, and five policy priorities.