A number of researchers have tried to put an economic value on women's household work - estimated as high as one-third of the global annual economic production.21 Two main methods have been developed. The first attempts to calculate the 'replacement cost' if the goods and services had to be purchased on the market rather than being provided for no cost by the housewife. Using this method, it was estimated that in 1979 women in the US provided, on average, $14,500 worth of cleaning, cooking and childcare services each year.22 American figures are likely to be significantly lower than comparable figures for Africa and other developing areas, where women are engaged in more subsistence agriculture and the provision of more primary health care services to family and community members than is the case in the industrialized countries.
A good example of a 'replacement cost' calculation can be found in studies of the economic value of breastfeeding. A 1988 study by the Geneva Infant Feeding Association (GIFA) estimates that in a country with a high population growth rate like Indonesia, mothers produce more than one billion litres of milk annually. They estimated the market value of this milk to be more than US $500 million, greater than that of the country's tin and coffee production. In Ghana, where there is a high breastfeeding rate, it is suggested that a loss of only one per cent of the national breastmilk production would cost about US $1 million for milk powder substitutes. In the Ivory Coast, GIFA estimates that breastfeeding saves the average family US $600 for each child's first two years. Globally, if all the mothers of the 120 million babies born in 1979 had breastfed, they, would have produced 30 billion litres of milk worth US $15 billion.23 Not included in these figures are the additional costs of equipment and fuel needed for bottle-feeding over breastfeeding.
The real value of breastmilk, however, is in its health-promoting and birth-spacing effects, which are much more difficult to calculate than the cost of replacing it with powder substitutes. The GIFA study points out that the decline of breastfeeding costs the world billions of dollars in increased health care costs for the treatment of babies who fall ill from bottle-feeding.24 Various studies have established that the poorer the socio-economic and environmental conditions under which families live, the greater the difference in health between breast-fed and bottle-fed infants. One study in Ghana suggested that the national cost of rehabilitating all children who were malnourished due to artificial feeding at low-cost nutrition centres would have been between US $100,000 and $800,000 back in 1976.25 This figure does not include any costs to the child's family, any illnesses other than malnutrition, or any capital costs for constructing nutrition centres, all of which would dramatically increase the estimate. The economic value of the natural contraceptive effect of breastfeeding is also difficult to calculate but likely to be significant, particularly for the benefits to women's health which birth-spacing promotes.26
The second method attempts to calculate the 'opportunity cost' of women's housework, that is the money that women forgo by working at home rather than in the formal labour force. To return to a breastfeeding example, a study in the late 1970s compared the opportunity costs of breastfeeding and bottle-feeding infants in Ghana over a two year period. The researchers estimated that breastfeeding and related activities (including some education, preparing and eating extra food for the mother) took 50 minutes daily, while bottle-feeding and related activities (including education, preparing formula, cleaning utensils, and purchasing or collecting extra water and fuel) took 180 minutes per day. The monetary value of time spent was determined to be the average wage for all women, which resulted in an opportunity cost over two years of US $210 for breastfeeding and $600 for bottle-feeding.27 When the opportunity cost of bottle-feeding is combined with