Comment on “Availability of Long‐term Care Facilities and Middle‐aged People's Labor Supply in Japan”

• Published date: 01 January 2017
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/aepr.12164
• Date: 01 January 2017
• Author: Emiko Usui

Comment on “Availability of Long-term Care

Facilities and Middle-aged People’sLabor

Supply in Japan”

Emiko USUI†

HitotsubashiUniversity and IZA

JEL codes: J14, J22

Several studies examine whether the public long-term care insurance program introduced

in Japan in 2000 increased the labor market participation of caregivers. Shimizutani et al.

(2008) find a significant positive effect on the labor market participation of female

caregivers two years after the introduction of the program. In contrast, Fukahori et al.

(2015) find a persistent negative relationship between having a family member who needs

care and being employed despite the introduction of this program. There is an absence of

both a consensusand extensive research on whether domesticcaregiving for elderly parents

prevents middle-aged people from participating in the labor market in Japan. Therefore,

Kondo (2017) makes an important contribution to the literature by being the first to use

the Labor Force Survey and the Employment Status Survey to study this subject. Since

the data from these surveys provide limitedinformation regarding the caregiving activities

of middle-aged people, Kondo (2017) addresses this issue by considering the availability of

long-term carefacilities in prefecturesand medical districts to be a proxyfor an individual’s

unlikelihoodof caring for his/her frail elderlyparents. This method is similarto that of Asai

et al. (2015) who use prefecture-level datato study the relationship betweenthe capacity of

child-care centers andthe labor market participation of mothers. Kondo(2017) concludes

that the availability of long-term carefacilities is unrelated to the labormarket participation

of middle-aged men and women.

The main purpose of this strand of research is to estimatethe following equation using

individual-level data and restricting the sample to individuals who have an elderly parent:

Y

it ¼θEPCit þXkλkLCkitEPCit þγ’Xit þεit (1)

where EPC

ip

indicateswhether an individual has an elderlyparent who needs care, and LC

kit

indicates whether the elderly parent who needs care is in a long-term care facility (that is,

the individual does not need to provide care for the parent). If access to a long-term care

facility enables the labor market participation of people who otherwise may have become

caregivers, thenθ<0andλ

k

>0. On the other hand, Kondo(2017) estimates the following

equation using individual-level data for a sample consisting of all middle-aged Japanese

individuals:

†Correspondence: Emiko Usui, Institute of Economic Research, Hitotsubashi University, 2-1 Naka,

Kunitachi, Tokyo, 186-8603, Japan.Email: usui@ier.hit-u.ac.jp

doi: 10.1111/aepr.12164 Asian EconomicPolicy Review (2017) 12, 113–114

©2017 JapanCenter for EconomicResearch 113

bs_bs_banner