As populations in developed countries age, demand for elder care is rising. By 2050, the proportion of individuals aged 80 and above in OECD countries will double, creating challenges for sustainable care systems. In the Nordic countries, a shrinking workforce and growing elder care needs raise critical policy questions. Families must balance caregiving with work, while governments need effective strategies to ensure adequate care services.
This research project examines the key factors influencing elder care demand and supply in Denmark, Sweden, and Norway. Our goal is to develop evidence-based policy recommendations for sustainable, cost-effective, and high-quality care systems. We address three core questions:
- Demand for Care: How much and what type of care do Nordic citizens need, and how does cost affect their choices?
- Supply of Care: How can Nordic countries recruit and retain skilled care workers to ensure a stable workforce?
- Policy Framework: What policies balance costs and benefits for sustainable elder care?
To explore these issues, we combine administrative data with survey experiments that reveal the preferences of care recipients, families, and elder care workers. Additionally, we exploit policy reforms across the three countries to estimate causal effects and develop a framework to evaluate the welfare effects of different elder care systems to provide evidence-based policy advice on providing equitable and efficient care.
Our team includes experts in public policy, health economics, labor markets, and survey design. We maintain a strong balance of junior and senior researchers, fostering innovative perspectives, established expertise, and a strong track record in policy advising and public outreach. This synergy enables us to establish a Nordic hub of excellence in economic research on elder care.
The Nordic context, with its robust welfare systems, unparalleled administrative data infrastructure, and recent reforms in the elder care sector, offers a unique opportunity to explore the trade-offs inherent in elder care policies. The key innovation of this project lies in its evaluation of the effects of policies on both the provision of care and the demand for care. By creating high-quality, policy-relevant data banks and an analytical framework, this project will not only advance the immediate research frontier but also facilitate future work in this area, enabling new insights that were previously unattainable.