Informal care and labour force participation among middle-aged women in Spain

David Casado-Marín,Pilar García-Gómez,Ángel López-Nicolás

doi:10.1007/s13209-009-0008-5

Abstract

AbstractInformal care is today the form of support most commonly used in Spain by those who need help in order to carry out basic daily activities. The potential labour opportunity costs incurred by Spanish informal carers have not as yet been quantified. In this paper we use the Spanish subsample of the European Community Household Panel (1994–2001) to estimate an econometric model which we exploit to examine the effects of various types of informal care on labour market outcomes. Our results reveal the existence of non-negligible costs in terms of foregone employment for carers who live with the dependent person and/or provide more than 28 h of care/week. We also find that providing care for more than a year has negative effects on employment. Nonetheless, there seems to be no contemporaneous employment effects associated to either starting or ending an episode of care.

Highlights

The process of population ageing that developing countries are likely to undergo in the coming decades is one of the phenomena whose social and economic consequences cause most concern
Following the lead of other European countries, which have had universal public long-term care systems for some years, Spain is developing a similar scheme known as the National Long-Term Care System (Sistema para la Autonomıa y Atencion a la Dependencia or SAAD) over the period 2007–2015.2 One of the main goals pursued through the SAAD, in addition to eliminating means testing for access to public long-term care services, is to strike a new balance between formal and informal care that is compatible with the higher labour force participation rates of future cohorts of middle-aged women
Given that a steep rise is expected in the percentage of women that will be in employment when someone in their family becomes dependent, the development of community services through the SAAD seeks to make providing a certain amount of informal care compatible with having a paid job

Summary

Introduction

The process of population ageing that developing countries are likely to undergo in the coming decades is one of the phenomena whose social and economic consequences cause most concern. Given that a steep rise is expected in the percentage of women that will be in employment when someone in their family becomes dependent, the development of community services (home care, day centres and so on) through the SAAD seeks to make providing a certain amount of informal care compatible with having a paid job This would avoid the negative consequences at an individual level associated with leaving the labour market (loss of income, smaller future pension, etc.) but would make it possible to take on family responsibilities without jeopardising the macroeconomic objective, enshrined in the Lisbon Agenda, of increasing the female labour force participation rate to 60% over the decade

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