Antti Parpo

The Temporal Welfare State

Welfare states contribute to peoples well-being in many different ways. One way of bringing those contributions under a common metric is in terms of ‘temporal autonomy’: the freedom to spend ones time as one will, outside the necessities of daily life. Using the 1999–2000 Finnish Time Use Survey, we propose ways of operationalising the time that is ‘strictly necessary’ to spend in paid labour, unpaid household labour and personal care; the residual, ‘discretionary time’, represents peoples temporal autonomy. We measure the impact on that of Finnish taxes, transfers and child care subsidies. In so doing, we calibrate the contributions of Finlands Nordic welfare regime and of its female-friendly gender regime, in ways that correspond to the lived reality of peoples daily lives.