Population aging implies an increase in the share of old population. A development of long-term care provision becomes necessary to ensure elderly people’s life quality at the end of the life cycle. However, long-term care is expensive, and a general public provision will bring a huge financial burden. How to design a provision scheme to balance quality and cost is an important policy issue for aging societies, even for many developing countries, which have been experienced significant improvements in life expectancy and sharp declines in fertility.

We plan to develop a generalized theoretical model (a life cycle model) that edogenize medical/long-term care expenditures to provide a structural analysis. The long-term care provision scheme, role of family support, supply of care givers, related population/labor policy will be specifically discussed. We will collect data from several target countries. A cross-country comparison in terms of degree of aging and current long-term care arrangement will be provided. We will apply the model to several groups of countries for providing policy implications.