Unpaid Caregiving and Labor Force Participation among Chinese Middle-Aged Adults.

Huamin Chai,Peter C Coyte,Rui Fu

doi:10.3390/ijerph18020641

Abstract

Unpaid family caregivers must consider the economic trade-off between caregiving and paid employment. Prior literature has suggested that labor force participation (LFP) declines with caregiving intensity, but no study has evaluated this relationship by accounting for the presence of both kinks and discontinuities. Here we used respondents of the China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study baseline survey who were nonfarming, of working age (aged 45–60) and had a young grandchild and/or a parent/parent-in-law. For women and men separately, a caregiving threshold-adjusted probit model was used to assess the association between LFP and weekly unpaid caregiving hours. Instrumental variables were used to rule out the endogeneity of caregiving hours. Of the 3718 respondents in the analysis, LFP for men was significantly and inversely associated with caregiving that involved neither discontinuities nor kinks. For women, a kink was identified at the caregiving threshold of eight hrs/w such that before eight hours, each caregiving hour was associated with an increase of 0.0257 in the marginal probability of LFP, but each hour thereafter was associated with a reduction of 0.0014 in the marginal probability of LFP. These results have implications for interventions that simultaneously advance policies of health, social care and labor force.

Highlights

By using nationally representative data from the China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study baseline survey, we investigated potential thresholds of weekly unpaid caregiving hours to see if they resulted in kinks and/or discontinuities in the relationship between caregiving and labor force participation
We report the marginal effect point estimate and the standard error. † The probit coefficient representing the association between labor force participation and caregiving hours after the threshold was calculated by summing the coefficients of CG and CG*CG
This study offers important empirical insights regarding the complex relationship between the intensity of unpaid caregiving and labor force participation among Chinese women and men

Summary

Introduction

With a rapidly ageing population and an increasing presence of women in the labor force, societies face a crisis when confronted with a dramatic increase in the demand for caregiving. In many low- or middle-income countries, middle-aged adults are often unpaid caregivers for their ageing parents (or parents-in-law), whereas grandparents usually take on the parental role for their grandchildren [1,2]. An important case study of unpaid caregiving among family members is China, which, due to decades of falling birth rates and rising life expectancy, has the world’s fastest ageing population [3]. Because China has very limited publicly funded home care, the percentage of adults who are unpaid caregivers to one or more family members is very high.

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