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Time on budget?

Author(s)	Mariëlle Cloïn, Marjon Schols en Andries van den Broek
Publication date	11 November 2010
Keywords
Price	€
Number of pages
ISBN/ISSN/other	978 90 377 0520 1
Series	Publication
Number	2010-26
Research group

Original title: Tijd op orde?

The Dutch - both government and public - set great store by the idea of 'taking part', by which they mean social participation in general and participation in the labour market in particular. However, no one's day contains more than 24 hours, which means there is pressure on people's available time and that choices have to be made. This publication analyses time management in the Netherlands from the perspective of the citizen. Full appointment diaries and having to do certain things at set times (work, school, opening hours) can lead to bottlenecks. Do people experience it in this way, and what solutions do they come up with? Do bottlenecks in people's time budgets stand in the way of greater participation in the labour market? This is found to be the case to only a very limited extent in this study; more flexible working hours and more extensive access to the various provisions are considered more desirable than increased childcare facilities and longer school opening hours. The desire to engage in (more) paid work is in fact not particularly great; increasing the labour participation rate appears to be more a question of changing attitudes than resolving time management issues. Other temporal conditions can help here, but do not offer a guaranteed outcome.