IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/esj/esridp/070.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

What Accounts for the Onerous Care Burden at Home in Japan? Evidence from Household Data(in Japanese)

Author

Listed:
  • SHIMIZUTANI Satoshi
  • NOGUCHI Haruko

Abstract

One of the most important purposes of Japan's introduction of public long-term care insurance in 2000 was to diminish the care burden at home, which traditionally depends heavily on women. This study takes advantage of unique micro-level information to examine whether the care burden has decreased for the first time. Moreover, we investigate what factors determine the care burden in individual households. Our empirical findings suggest that total care hours of the main caregiver at home slightly decreased after the introduction of the long-term care insurance. Still, the number of care hours worked by the main caregiver-mostly women-increased. If the sample is divided into those who work more than eight hours and less than eight hours, the share of households with longer care hours has not substantially declined. Both care receivers and care givers are in worse health conditions in the case of longer care hours. In other words, the care burden takes a serious toll both in hours spent and on physical condition. We propose several hypotheses to explain why the care burden at home is still enormous, even several years after the introduction of public care insurance. We found that this is partly explained by (1) an increase in the monetary burden to use care services for low-income households, (2) care by caregivers at home cannot be replaced by outsourcing, and (3) strategic bequest motives in the case that care hours are extremely long (more than 12 hours per day) .

Suggested Citation

  • SHIMIZUTANI Satoshi & NOGUCHI Haruko, 2003. "What Accounts for the Onerous Care Burden at Home in Japan? Evidence from Household Data(in Japanese)," ESRI Discussion paper series 070, Economic and Social Research Institute (ESRI).
  • Handle: RePEc:esj:esridp:070
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.esri.go.jp/jp/archive/e_dis/e_dis070/e_dis070a.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Matthew A. COLE & Robert J R ELLIOTT & OKUBO Toshihiro & Eric STROBL, 2013. "The Future of Long-term Care in Japan," Discussion papers 13064, Research Institute of Economy, Trade and Industry (RIETI).
    2. Satoshi Shimizutani, 2006. "Japan's Long-term Care Insurance Program: An Overview," Swiss Journal of Economics and Statistics (SJES), Swiss Society of Economics and Statistics (SSES), vol. 142(V), pages 23-28.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:esj:esridp:070. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: HORI nobuko (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/esrgvjp.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.