Aging in the Family in Low- and Middle-Income Countries

Objetivo

Low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) are aging fast and without widespread access to public or employer-provided pensions. FamAge will provide crucial new evidence on the sources of support – private, family, and public – that older adults in LMICs draw on, how these support mechanisms operate separately, interact together, and respond to economic, demographic, and policy changes.

In Work Package 1 (WP1), I will open the black box of intergenerational family support by examining who gives money and care to whom, under what conditions, and generating what inequalities. I will develop and estimate a dynamic, limited-commitment model of multigenerational resource sharing for India, allowing for evolving inequality and the breakdown of care relations. Using rich household panels, I will quantify transfers of money and care, and assess the roles of bequeathable wealth, private saving, shocks, and public programs.

WP2 will focus on the demand for private pensions. I will implement a cluster-randomized controlled trial around the rollout of a new contributory pension program in rural Uganda aimed at informal workers. The trial will identify the price sensitivity of demand, the displacement of existing savings, and the roles of intra-couple bargaining and subjective expectations.

In WP3, I will then embed new insights from WP1 and WP2 into a unified lifecycle model with endogenous labor supply, health, consumption, saving, and family transfers, and estimate it separately for 11 LMICs using newly available panels of aging populations. A first aim is to assess whether canonical lifecycle models can adequately explain the economic preparation for aging in LMICs and identify modifications that improve their usefulness. I will then use the estimates to decompose the determinants of lifecycle patterns of poverty, saving, and labor supply, and to assess the counterfactual impacts of alternative policies, such as new or expanded pension systems.

Ámbito científico (EuroSciVoc)

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