The Sectoral Productivity and the Behavior of the Economy in which the Home Production of Household Goods Is Inevitable

Abstract

All household goods such as cooked food, clean clothes and house, and care of children and the elderly are not only produced by producer-consumer households; some of them are produced by capitalist firms and the public sector, including such informal ones as neighboring communities. However, the amounts of them provided by these external producers by themselves are entirely inadequate to satisfy the demand of their family members for these goods, so that the households are obliged to produce in their family firms whatever amounts of them are left unprovided but are demanded by their family members. The inadequate supply in relation to the demand for them may be due on the one hand to the kinship emotion of family members in providing their beloved ones with as large an amount of them as is possible and on the other to the hesitation of external producers in charging a higher price for these goods for their “welfare consideration” of not imposing a heavier financial burden on their needy customers. Furthermore, as the economy develops, its supporting society tends to become increasingly industrialized and urbanized, which often pulls working members apart from other members of family and the family as a whole from the local communities it is accustomed to. On the other hand, in the course of these developments the nuclear families become more numerous than the multigenerational ones where household goods can be more readily exchanged among individual members than in the former type of families.