This public lecture is now available as: MP3 (please listen to the file below in three parts) and PDF (as a courtesy to the presenter, please contact her for permission to refer to her PowerPoint notes for the purpose of further research).

The ageing population of Europe requires the member countries of the European Union to consider ways to enhance cost-effective public policies for elderly care. This presentation probes public policy options on the basis of an analysis of data from the European Community Household Panel. It shows that government expenditure on formal residential care and home-help services for the elderly significantly reduces informal care-giving by 45-59 year old women. The analysis implies that a € 1000 increase in the government expenditure on formal residential care and home-help services for the elderly decreases the probability of informal care-giving outside of the caregiver’s household by 6 percentage points. Formal care substitutes for informal care that is undertaken outside of the carer’s own household, but does not substitute for intergenerational household formation. A simulation exercise shows that an increase in government formal care expenditure is a cost-effective way of increasing the labour force participation rates.

Dr Tarja Viitanen is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Otago. Her main research interests are in applied labour economics, public sector economics, law and economics, economics of the family and microeconometrics. She studied Economics and Statistics at the University of Birmingham, before gaining her MA in Econometrics from the University of Manchester (2000), and PhD from the University of Warwick (2005). Prior to moving to New Zealand in 2009, Tarja worked at the University of Sheffield, the London School of Economics, University College Dublin and the German Institute for Economic Research (DIW) in Berlin. She is a Research Fellow at the Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA) in Bonn (Germany).

To view the flyer for this event please see: Public Policy and Elderly Care Across Europe