Dependency and Poverty

This work examines the economic conditions of dependent elderly people and their families, in order to investigate the existence of a relation between the condition of dependence and the risk of falling into poverty. For this purpose, we divide the research in to phase. The result of the first phase, obtained through a cluster analysis, is the definition of four typologies of the European States on the basis of LTC systems' specific aspects (public expenditure, accessibility and delivery of services and the care market composition), which in our opinion, affect the level of private resources (both in term of time and money) that dependent elderly people and their family members devote to care. On the basis of the result of the cluster analysis we selected a restrict number of countries in order to estimate the possible connection between the level of private care resources related to the health condition of the elderly and the risk of poverty, both for the dependent elderly and for their adult children. Through the use of micro data, this work offers an analysis of the impacts of the LTC system reform processes on the formal and informal services, during the last ten years. Logistic regression models are used for estimate the relationship between the risk of poverty, the private care resources, the individual and family characteristics and the benefits that the dependent elderly people receive from LTC system. At the aggregate level, the main sources of data are represented by ESSPROS, SHA, OECD and EUROSTAT. At the micro level we use the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE: wave 1, wave 2 and wave 4) to analyze both LTC-related spending and the elderly person’s and its family income. We utilize the dataset of the three waves of SHARE in order to use a diachronic approach for better understanding of the incidence of the dependent condition on the income of the elderly and their family.