Trade-off between formal and informal care in Spain

Sergi Jimenez-Martin and Cristina Vilaplana Prieto

Economics Working Papers from Department of Economics and Business, Universitat Pompeu Fabra

Abstract: The remarkable growth of older population has moved long term care to the front ranks of the social policy agenda. Understanding the factors that determine the type and amount of formal care is important for predicting use in the future and developing long-term policy. In this context we jointly analyze the choice of care (formal, informal, both together or none) as well as the number of hours of care received. Given that the number of hours of care is not independent of the type of care received, we estimate, for the first time in this area of research, a sample selection model with the particularity that the first step is a multinomial logit model. With regard to the debate about complementarity or substitutability between formal and informal care, our results indicate that formal care acts as a reinforcement of the family care in certain cases: for very old care receivers, in those cases in which the individual has multiple disabilities, when many care hours are provided, and in case of mental illness and/or dementia. There exist substantial differences in long term care addressed to younger and older dependent people and dependent women are in risk of becoming more vulnerable to the shortage of informal caregivers in the future. Finally, we have documented that there are great disparities in the availability of public social care across regions.

Keywords: Formal care; informal care; caregiver; dependent (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I1 J14 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2008-06
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-age, nep-eec, nep-hea and nep-ias
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://econ-papers.upf.edu/papers/1096.pdf Whole Paper (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: The trade-off between formal and informal care in Spain (2012)
Working Paper: Trade-off between formal and informal care in Spain (2008)
Working Paper: Trade-off between formal and informal care in Spain (2008)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:upf:upfgen:1096

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Economics Working Papers from Department of Economics and Business, Universitat Pompeu Fabra
Bibliographic data for series maintained by (william.carlson@upf.edu this e-mail address is bad, please contact repec@repec.org).