Abstract
This volume focuses on gendered differences in the economic resources of the elderly and the individuals charged with meeting the day-to-day care needs of the elderly. Often the burden of care falls on women, who themselves have less access to care as they age. The introduction gives an overview of the public policy initiatives, social insurance and welfare programs, and family provisions for care that are thoroughly examined in the following contributions. The volume highlights both cross-national contrasts and common challenges to meeting the economic and care needs of the growing elderly population.
Keywords:
Public discussion of population aging is usually focused on the financial burden that increasingly elderly populations will impose on younger generations. In the developed world, arguments arise over the role of private saving for retirement versus public social insurance systems. Scholars give much less attention to who does the actual work of day-to-day care for those no longer able to care for themselves. Although women are the majority among the elderly, little is heard about gender differences in economic resources or the need for care. This special issue is dedicated to giving gender its rightful place in these discussions.
Feminist economists have been in the forefront of research on caring work. Since public discussions of aging tend to neglect this aspect, it is fitting that this special issue of Feminist Economics begins with Agneta Stark's overview of the worldwide dilemmas of eldercare today. As Stark shows, the actual work of caring is still done primarily by women, even though a larger portion of care than before is paid rather than unpaid. The role of the state in supporting caregiving varies widely, as examples from three European countries show. Susan Eaton describes the inadequacy of eldercare provision in the United States, where most government funding goes to privately run nursing homes, and the quality of care is often not adequately monitored. Both Stark and Eaton advocate new ways of organizing care and an increased role in caregiving by men.
One approach to this issue is the structure of income provision for older populations. Outside the developed world, economic resources for the elderly are provided primarily by families. Jennifer Olmsted describes the case of Palestine where, as in most of the Arab world, a strong patriarchal contract gives older women a claim on family resources through their sons or sometimes brothers. Women who do not have children are vulnerable to poverty in old age. This system is tending to weaken as families become smaller and high rates of unemployment make support less certain.
South Africa, as described by Justine Burns, Malcolm Keswell, and Murray Leibbrandt, is unusual for the developing world in having a generous means-tested social pension in which about three-quarters of the participants are women. Although the system has reduced poverty among the elderly, the pensions appear to be widely shared among other family members, and unemployed children often move in with elderly parents or send their children to live with grandparents in order to benefit from the pension. This is an aspect of social insurance systems that has not received much attention. Might social insurance for the elderly also contribute to the well-being of younger family members in wealthy countries as well, especially countries like the US that have inadequate safety nets for young families and children?
In rich countries, public attention has been focusing on shifting more responsibility for economic support of the elderly from social insurance to private investment. Some countries with well-established public and private pension systems have recently shifted toward privatization. Therese Jefferson and Alison Preston describe the disadvantages for women when such a change was made in Australia. Women should regard greater dependence on markets for retirement income with skepticism because women tend to live longer, while earning less than men.
The US is currently debating changes in its Social Security system. One proposal to put the system on a firmer financial basis is to increase the age of eligibility for benefits, which would in effect be a benefit reduction. Carole Greene argues that this proposal would have an especially adverse effect on African Americans and other minorities because they tend to hold physically demanding jobs that make them less able to work at older ages. Madonna Harrington Meyer, Douglas A. Wolf, and Christine L. Himes show that the majority of women in the US currently receive Social Security benefits based on marital status rather than their own earnings. However, far fewer minority women qualify for spousal or survivor benefits, and the system thus favors women in stable marriages – predominantly white women. Unfortunately, in the present political climate, the most likely change will be toward privatization, which is likely to be harmful for both minorities and all but the wealthiest women.
A concluding report section offers cross-national contrasts of different kinds of support systems for the elderly. Timothy Smeeding and Susanna Sandström show that a social insurance system with an adequate minimum benefit does the best job of avoiding poverty among elderly women. Lois Shaw and Sunhwa Lee demonstrate that elderly women in the US depend heavily on the Social Security system, which nevertheless leaves all too many of them in poverty. Finally, Kyunghee Chung considers the problems in a rapidly developing country with a newly instituted public pension system that covers few of the elderly at present. In South Korea, families provide most of the support for elderly members, including both financial support and daily care when needed.
This final report brings all the strands of aging together: economic resources, health and care needs, and actual care provision. This kind of inventory of resources and needs can serve to remind us that whether through individual families or social insurance, through family caregivers or paid help, the oldest generation will continue to depend on adults of working age for its well-being.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This volume has been a collaborative effort by the editors, the journal Feminist Economics, and the International Association for Feminist Economics. The journal's rigorous reviewing process, aided by the thoughtful and unpaid work of many reviewers, has greatly contributed to the quality of this volume. Diana Strassmann, the journal's editor, assembled the editorial team, helped write the funding proposal, and provided superb managerial oversight. The editorial staff of Feminist Economics, particularly Raj Mankad, Cheryl Morehead, Mo´nica Parle, and Eva Chan, and the journal's graduate fellows, Anne Dayton, Jill Delsigne, and Victoria Ford, assisted with a myriad of important tasks, including checking that each article conformed to the journal's editorial policies and was clear to the journal's diverse and interdisciplinary audience. Special thanks also to the journal's style editors, Polly Koch and Polly Morrice. Finally, we thank Rice University and the Swedish International Development Agency for their financial support.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Nancy Folbre
JEL Codes: H55, I31, I38, J14, J16Notes
JEL Codes: H55, I31, I38, J14, J16
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