Free Time and Leisure Participation

As the pace of life increases and the effects of globalisation invade more and more areas of everyday life, free time becomes an increasingly precious resource. For those who are experiencing a shortage of free time - a 'time-squeeze' - and for the growing numbers looking forward to abundant free time in retirement, leisure has never been more vital for ensuring individual and social health and wellbeing and the enhancement of social capital and the quality of life.This book is an expanded and updated edition of a previous work entitled "World Leisure Participation: Free Time in the Global Village", by the same editors (CABI, 1996). It brings together the results of national leisure participation surveys from around the world. In addition to updating chapters to include the latest surveys, the book includes increased coverage of time-budget surveys and new themes such as public policy dimensions. The following countries, three of which were not covered in the earlier volume, are included, Australia, Canada, Finland, France, Germany, Great Britain, Hong Kong, Israel, Japan, Netherlands, New Zealand, Poland, Russia, Spain, USA.This book was first published as a hardback in 2005.