ABSTRACT

Despite increasing attention to long-term care (LTC) and related challenges in the Estonian social policy agenda, the distributional fairness of LTC services in the country has received very limited attention. Using SHARE data, we address informal and formal home care services and identify the socio-economic factors that drive or hinder their use among the Estonian elderly. The relationship between informal and formal home care utilization is estimated applying the new approach to instrumental variable method proposed by Lewbel [2012. Using heteroscedasticity to identify and estimate mismeasured and endogenous regressor models. Journal of Business and Economic Statistics, 30(1), 67–80]. We find that it is important to distinguish among informal care provided by household members, other relatives and non-relatives because the same socio-economic factors might differentially affect the propensity to use these kinds of care. The estimation results indicate that informal care provided by non-relatives complements formal home care. LTC policy in Estonia ensures the absence of tangible financial, ethnic and urban/rural barriers to the use of formal home care.

摘要

尽管爱沙尼亚社会政策议程中越来越关注长期护理（LTC）和相关挑战，但该国LTC服务的分配公平性受到的关注非常有限。使用SHARE数据，我们可以解决非正式和正式的家庭护理服务，并确定在爱沙尼亚老年人中推动或阻碍其使用的社会经济因素。运用Lewbel [2012.]提出的工具变量新方法估算了非正式和正式家庭护理利用之间的关系。使用异方差来识别和估计错误度量的内生回归模型。商业和经济统计杂志，30（1），67–80]。我们发现，区分由家庭成员，其他亲戚和非亲戚提供的非正式照料非常重要，因为相同的社会经济因素可能会不同地影响使用这类照料的倾向。估计结果表明，由非亲戚提供的非正式照料是对正式家庭照料的补充。爱沙尼亚的长期护理政策确保在使用正式家庭护理方面不存在明显的财务，种族和城市/农村障碍。