Tag: Informal Care

The Hidden Value of Adult Informal Care in Europe

Jason Shafrin

That is the title of a paper from Costa-Font and Vilaplana-Prieto (2025). They find the the value is very large indeed. Relative to a country’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP), the value of IC [informal care] ranges between 4.2% in France and 0.85% in Germany. Such relative value declines as the country’s share of formal LTC…

The cost of Informal Elder Care

Jason Shafrin1 Comment

Many adults spend significant time caring for sick, elderly parents.  What is the cost of providing this informal care?  Would it be better to have family members outsource the care to formal caregivers? A paper by Chari, Engberg, Ray and Mehrotra (2014) attempt to answer this question.  They use data from the  American Time Use Survey…