Organizing care for older people is one of the most important issues in European countries due to the rapidly aging population, characterized by a rise in the share of the elderly caused by longer life expectancy and declining fertility rates. We can expect a big increase in the need for care on one hand, and a smaller number of potential informal carers on the other. Both trends are likely to place greater demands on formal care systems across Europe.
In the proposed symposia, we would like to address several recent articles related to characteristics of long-term care (LTC) systems, related to usage of SHARE (Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe) data. We will firstly address evidence on the explanatory potential of the societal characteristics of care (e.g. characteristics of LTC systems, provision of formal home care), using a significantly broadened set of LTC system' characteristics of the countries. Although econometric studies of LTC systems have become widespread, the evidence on the contextual factors, determining the extent and type of LTC is still sparse.
Next, surprising findings from the data (confirmed in the recent literature) show that the informal carers are sometimes those of worse health, in particular in the within-household context. We will provide a new and detailed explanation for this observation, based on causal inference models and some policy prescriptions for future measures for the support to informal long-term carers.
Attempts to assess unmet needs for LTC are growing, as the countries need to implement the reforms in this field. Yet, most of the existing measures can be hard to implement in practice. We will present a new classification of LTC needs based on LOSS scale, using SHARE data, with high applicability for future research and, in particular, policy usage, with an application to Slovenia.
Finally, we will address new empirical evidence, showing that GALI measure of disability is significantly more related to health care needs than ADL and/or IADL measures, while the exact opposite holds for the assesment of LTC needs of older people (complementing some findings in the recent literature), and present its explanation and (significant) consequences for future policy approaches to the issue of assessing health care and LTC needs at the international level.
Conveners
Andrej Srakar, Institute for Economic Research, Ljubljana and Faculty of Economics, University of Ljubljana, srakara@ier.si
Eva Helena Zver, MSc, IMAD - Institute for Macroeconomic Analysis and Development of Republic of Slovenia, eva.zver@gov.si
Discussant
Maša Filipovič Hrast, Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia