sector of primary activity as well. Langsten and Salem (2008) found similar results for Egypt. This quote from a participant in a focus group interviewed for a World Bank study illustrates the difference between what a labor statistician means by “work” or “job” and what the man in the village considers “work”. When asked if they would like their lives to be like their parents, a young male, the son of a farmer, responded “Not me, my father _has never worked_ . He has been here on this farm, which he inherited, his whole life”.<sup>9</sup> Most likely this father’s long “non-working” life included a lot of hard, physical, economic activity.

Another common problem in low-income settings is the mixing of inactivity and activity in the same question, as mutually exclusive alternatives, as well as the use of the ambiguous term “domestic duties” or “homemaker” as a reason for inactivity. In OECD countries, most students do not work, so these two activities are mutually exclusive. This may not be the case in a low-income setting however. Likewise, in OECD countries “domestic duties” involving mostly those household chores such as caring for others that are not classified as economic activities if done by a member of the household. But in a low-income setting, many activities performed around the house are classified as economic because: (ii) the household is a production unit as well as a consumption unit, so household members in the same day or week often undertake economic activities as contributing family workers as well as household chores not classified as economic activities, and (ii) a large share of household chores in low-income countries are classified as work because they are economic services such as fetching water and wood because these are not accessible within the household (e.g. the household has no access to piped water).

Research shows that the large female presence among economically active contributing family workers may lead to an undercounting of female LFPR if the questions are not worded carefully (DixonMueller and Anker, 1988). This is particularly a big problem for women and youth, as their tasks are more likely to be ignored by a respondent yet they are classified as employment according to the ILO-SNA definitions. Beegle, et. al. (2010) found that if economic activity and inactivity were included in the same question, as mutually exclusive alternatives, women are more likely to report not being economically active because they are engaged mainly in domestic activities. Yet after screening questions, many of these same women did report being engaged in economic activities. In the simple formulation, asking them if their main activity was work or domestic duties, they chose the vague phrase “domestic duties” because that described their life to them, even it did not describe the types of activities the survey was meant to measure.

Fox and Gaal (2008) used Tanzania Household Budget Survey data on economic activities of female heads of households to show that (i) when screening questions were not used and (ii) “homemaker” and other inactivity variables were offered as responses _together_ with activity variables in one activity question (to save space), the share of household heads in the working age population reporting that they were out of the labor force doubled. In urban areas, it nearly tripled as women heads of households chose homemaker as a status in much larger numbers. With increased incomes in urban areas, it is possible that some female heads of households withdrew from the labor force, but not this magnitude, given that they have to support children.

> 9 From the dataset collected for World Bank (2011); emphasis added.

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