The economics of long-term care: a survey

This paper surveys recent theoretical economic research on long-term care (LTC). LTC differs from health care: it is about nursing; it is mostly provided by unpaid caregivers (mainly spouses and children), whereas both the market and the state play a modest role. The future of LTC appears to be gloomy: sustained population ageing and recent societal trends (e.g., children's mobility, changes in family values) generate a mounting demand on the state and on the market to provide alternatives to the family. In this paper, we review these causes, and the extent to which we can expect them to fade away in the future. Then, we turn to the design of a sustainable public LTC scheme integrating both the market and the family