Informal Care for the Elderly in South Korea and the Impact on Caregivers' Labor Force Participation

Thursday, May 8, 2008
12:00 PM - 1:15 PM
(Pacific)
Daniel and Nancy Okimoto Conference Room
Speaker: 

Rapid population aging in many Asian countries poses an increased burden of care for elderly people with disabilities. Traditionally, care for the disabled elderly was provided by family members co-residing or living nearby. However, declining fertility rates, eroding social norms, and growing rates of labor force participation among females have changed the overall picture of informal care. 

One important policy question is whether informal caregiving affects caregivers' labor force participation. This question is particularly relevant for rapidly developing economies including newly industrialized countries, because a shrinking working-age population is another major concern with population aging. Providing different answers to this question leads to different policy implications for long-term care policy and labor market policy. 

Most of the existing literature on this issue comes from the United States and Europe. Using data from the first wave of the "Korean Longitudinal Study of Aging", Do's research not only provides results from a less-studied Asian society, but also takes into account different patterns of living arrangements and labor force participation. His talk will deal with the methodological issue of endogeneity between informal caregiving and labor force participation, and explore gender and age group differences.

Young Kyung Do is currently completing his PhD in health policy and administration at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Public Health. He has also earned both an MD and a master of public health degrees from Seoul National University (in 1997 and 2003, respectively). Young earned board certification in preventive medicine from the Korean Medical Association in 2004.