Does Welfare Receipt Change Consumption on Health among Older Families? The Case of China

Embracing Challenges for Population Aging in China: Building Scientific Evidence to Inform Long-Term Care Policymaking and Practice

In China, rapid aging of the population is driving up demand for healthcare and long-term care services for older adults. This special issue of the Journal of Aging & Social Policy features a collection of studies that provided timely analyses and fresh insights into a wide range of policy relevant topics concerning long-term care for older adults in China. In this introductory article, we orient readers to these studies organized under four themes: migration, caregiving, and elder care challenges; long-term care service users, frontline workers, and workforce challenges; unmet needs across the care span in healthcare, long-term care, and end of life care; and long-term care financing. We highlight major findings and contributions of each study and provide perspectives on key issues within China's evolving healthcare and social policy contexts. Collectively, these studies contribute to building scientific evidence where it is lacking and supporting evidence-based long-term care policymaking and practice to meet the mounting challenges of population aging in China.

Out- Of- Pocket health expenditure and household consumption patterns in Benin: Is there a crowding out effect?

Health shocks are common and have serious consequences for households in developing countries where health insurance is lacking. In this study, we examine whether out-of-pocket health expenditures crowd out household consumption of non-healthcare necessities, such as education items in Benin using a sample of 14,952 households from the global vulnerability and food security analysis survey. We estimated a system of conditional Engel curves with three stage least squared (3SLS) and seemingly unrelated regression (SURE) for seven categories of goods using the Quadratic Almost Ideal Demand System (QUAIDS) in the form of budget shares corresponding to proportions of total non-health expenditure. Findings show that out of pocket health expenditure leads households to spend more on health care that in fine crowd out expenditure in other necessity goods such as education item. These findings highlight the need for social protection programs to mitigate the impact of health shocks on vulnerable households in Benin.