In economics, the voluntary sector is surprisingly understudied. In order to fully understand economics, unpaid and voluntary work needs to be taken into account and afforded the same status as paid activities. This book constitutes a rigorous economic analysis with special emphasis on gender issues and covers every conceivable angle of unpaid work and all its ramifications for the modern economy. The unified vision offered by this group of leading contributors ensures this book is a work of excellent quality. There is every chance it will become a seminal study on unpaid work and as such will provide a useful reference for students and academics involved in gender studies, econometrics, and consumption studies.

The voluntary sector is surprisingly understudied in economics. In order to fully understand economics, unpaid and voluntary work needs to be taken into account and afforded the same status as paid activities.
This book constitutes a rigorous economic analysis with special emphasis on gender issues and covers every conceivable angle of unpaid work and all its ramifications for the modern economy.
The unified vision that is offered by the leading array of contributors makes for a work of excellent quality. There is every chance that this book will become a seminal study on unpaid work and as such will provide a useful reference for students and academics involved in gender studies, econometrics, and consumption studies.

This book focuses on the relationship between the process of production of commodities and the process of social reproduction of the labouring population, and seeks to restore that problematic relationship to the central place it had in the analysis of Smith, Ricardo, and Marx. The argument is directly opposed to that of the wages-fund theorists, who rejected the classical view of labour as a very special type of commodity whose price was determined exogenously by material, historical and institutional factors. By substituting a strict supply-and-demand mechanism they and their followers effectively removed the whole question of social reproduction from economic theory. This rendered marginal or analytically invisible certain fundamental aspects of the system. In this investigation the author draws on the history of economic thought, social history, and applied economics, using the surplus definition of profit. The resulting perspective, centred on the relation between production and social reproduction, opens new directions for economic analysis.