Economic development in parallel to demographic changes over the past decades have altered family structures and the way care is given and received along the lifecycle. This long-running trend has been recently affected by the Covid-19 pandemic, especially the tragic rates of mortality in too many institutional care settings for the elderly, and the widespread closures of schools. These dramatic changes make more evident how the market economy relies on non-market economic activities to provide welfare in general and care to dependent children and elders. At the same time, it has highlighted just how much the informal care economy relates to inequality in general and exposes the gender gap.
WELLCARE research investigates how the welfare state, the market, and the family interact to provide care along the lifecycle and hence, how it affects welfare and inequality at both intra and intergenerational levels. More specifically, WELLCARE first provides a comprehensive view of the care economy in the following dimensions:
– Care given and received along the whole life cycle, including both care given to children, disabled and the dependent elderly.
– The different resource allocation mechanisms available to provide care (market, government and family).
Second, WELLCARE provides more in-depth understanding of the sources of intra and intergenerational inequality accounting for the role of the care economy by:
– Exploring and integrating information from existing sample survey and related microdata sets in Europe and Canada to produce a quantified view of the care economy both in financial terms and for measures of informal care provided and received.
– Based on this empirical analysis, developing the dynamic microsimulation model WELLCARE to simulate and project into the future measures of care both to children and to the elderly provided formally by the market or the government and informally by the family.
Team members
Prof Matteo Richiardi
Dr Patryk Bronka
Dr Justin Van De Ven
