Aider un parent âgé se fait-il au détriment de l'emploi ?

To reduce the potential burden of the ageing population on public finances, the European Council set EU member states the target of increasing the senior employment rate. Considering that seniors play a major role in caring for dependent elderly people, it is appropriate to ask whether a policy aimed at extending the working lives of seniors is compatible with a policy to support informal care forelderly people. Won't informal care decrease if the senior employment rate rises? Or, looking at it from the opposite angle, won't shifting the burden of care for elderly people to families hamper growth in senior employment? In order to answer these questions, this article proposes a quantitative study basedon data from SHARE (Wave 2). The analysis first identifies differences betweenEuropean countries with respect to care that seniors provide to their elderly singleparents: caring for an elderly parent is more frequent in northern Europe than in southern Europe, but the care provided by senior carers is far more "intensive" in southern Europe. Countries in continental and eastern Europe occupy an intermediateposition. An econometric assessment of the trade-off between elder care andemployment also shows that spending more than one hour per day on averagehelping an elderly single parent reduces the probability of having a job in southernand eastern Europe, where public support for dependency is more limited, whereas this does not seem to have a significant impact in northern and continental Europe.