Comparing Care Regimes in Europe

Abstract

Throughout Europe, the family is still an important provider of care, but welfare state policies of individual countries may support and/or supplement the family in different ways, generating different social and economic outcomes. This article compares and categorizes care strategies for children and elderly persons in different member states of the European Union, while also taking into account the varied modalities for providing care, like leave arrangements, financial provisions, and social services. In EU countries, care regimes function as “social joins” ensuring complementarity between economic and demographic institutions and processes. As these processes and institutions change, they provide impetus for care regimes to change as well. However, because ideas and ideals about care are at the core of individual national identities, care regimes also act as independent incentive structures that impinge on patterns of women's labor market participation and fertility.

Keywords:

• Families
• Europe
• social policy
• childcare
• elderly care

Notes

JEL Codes: I38, J13, J16

Unpaid “external” care measured by indicator (b) lumps together unpaid care by, say, relatives, and free public care services. This is unsatisfactory. However, the underlying idea is that the more care services are “outsourced,” the higher the chance that families must pay for them, even if the public sector provides some free care. Evidence that countries like France and Denmark, where public provisions are well developed, also record a relatively high incidence of paid external care is consistent with this idea (see Appendix A for figures).

Obviously, there is no neat dividing line between policies that focus on money and those that provide services only. Parents, for example, may receive subsidies to purchase childcare services. In this case we presume that money paid by the state, whether to private childcare providers or to parents, should be considered support in form of services. Such support should result in a higher proportion of children using formal childcare arrangements.

A more precise definition is obtainable from Eurostat Esspross Manual 1996. Luxembourg: Office for Official Publications of the European Community.

In the case of macro, or aggregate, data, we often found that indicators for Luxembourg took on extreme values. For example, the per-child social expenditure on families and children based on Eurostat published figures is 2.4 times higher than the average for the remaining fourteen European countries, while the expenditure on pensions per citizen older than 65 is 1.8 higher than the EU14 average (see Figures 4 and 5). These data suggest that a city-state like Luxembourg may not be entirely comparable to larger and more diversified countries. In the case of microdata like those on hours of unpaid care, we have already lamented the poor quality of the data that forced us to make a very “risk-averse” use of them. Such data problems are exacerbated when the number of answers in the relevant cells is low, and this is bound to happen more frequently with a small country (and sample) like Luxembourg.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Francesca Bettio

JEL Codes: I38, J13, J16