Social policies and intergenerational support in Italy and South Korea Ginevra Floridi (Corresponding author) Department of Social Policy, London School of Economics and political Science, London, United Kingdom Email: g.floridi@lse.ac.uk 1
Social policies and intergenerational support in Italy and South Korea This article explores the interaction between social policies and exchanges of support between older parents and their adult children in Italy and South Korea. In both countries, welfare characteristics imply that family members rely strongly upon one another for support. However, social security systems, labour market arrangements and family policies allocate resources between age groups in different proportions, favouring pensioners in Italy and prime-age workers in Korea. This difference may influence and interact with exchanges of support within families. Using 2012 – 2013 harmonised data from surveys of ageing, exchanges of financial support, instrumental care and intergenerational co-residence between parents aged 50 and above and their children are compared between Italy and Korea. The analysis reveals marked differences between the two countries. In Italy, where societal transfers favour older people, intergenerational support appears to be mainly directed from parents to children, with complementary forms of filial help to ageing parents. In Korea, where old-age protection is scarce, older parents are more heavily dependent upon children in cases of need. The findings add to the existing literature on the relationship between societal and family transfers in European welfare regimes by exploring these interactions in broader contexts and for broader policy areas. Keywords : Intergenerational transfers; familialism; social security; labour market dualism; Italy; South Korea. 2
Introduction This study explores the interaction between social policies, labour market arrangements and exchanges of support between older parents and their adult children in Italy and South Korea (henceforth referred to as ‘Korea’) around 2012– 2013. The aim is to describe how differences in the societal allocation of resources between generations in the two countries are related to flows of financial, instrumental and co-residential support between older parents and their adult children. Italy and Korea have been chosen for comparison because, in both countries, welfare characteristics and societal norms make family members strongly reliant upon one another for support. However, in the period considered, societal transfers allocated resources between age groups in different proportions, favouring the older generation in Italy, and younger adults in Korea. Previous work has hypothesised family exchanges to complement societal transfers by specialising in different types of support (Deindl & Brandt, 2011). Consistent with this hypothesis, family transfers are expected to redistribute resources mainly from parents to children in Italy, and mainly from children to parents in Korea. Moreover, filial support to ageing parents may respond to critical parental need in Korea, while in Italy it may fulfil complementary rather than essential functions. Using harmonised survey data, intergenerational support is compared across three dimensions: financial transfers; exchanges of instrumental support (in the form of grandchild care, personal care and help with daily activities or household chores); and intergenerational co-residence, which facilitates support through in-kind transfers and cost-sharing (Isengard & Szydlik, 2012) . Throughout the paper, the term ‘older parents’ refers to people aged 50 and above with at least one living child. Italy and South Korea are treated here as homogenous contexts, thereby overlooking wide regional disparities in socioeconomic and policy characteristics within each country. There are also limitations in comparing such different contexts, as the concept of intergenerational support may not be directly translatable across cultures, or may be manifested in ways that are not captured by the data. Nevertheless, the comparison is 3
deemed relevant in the light of the clear similarities in welfare policies, labour markets and norms about the family between the two countries. Conceptualising intergenerational support Intergenerational support is defined here as the giving and receiving of money, care and help between older parents and their adult children, directly and/or through shared living arrangements. Studies of European countries using data from the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE, 2013) have found financial support to be predominantly from parents to children, while personal care and help with daily activities follow more mixed trajectories, with older parents commonly providing care for grandchildren and receiving care and help from their children at advanced ages (Brandt & Deindl, 2013). The popularity of co-residence between generations varies across European countries according to social policies and cultural preferences (Albertini & Kohli, 2013). Limited studies of intergenerational support in East Asia are available, but the evidence suggests that exchanges of support follow different directions from those prevalent in Europe. Intergenerational support tends to flow mainly from children to parents, and, despite changes in contemporary intergenerational relations, co-residence between generations remains a common form of old-age support, connected to cultural norms of filial responsibility (Lin & Yi, 2013). Attempts to disentangle causation often conceptualise intergenerational support as the product of interactions among individual, family and country-level circumstances (Albertini, 2016). At the individual and family level, intergenerational support can be seen as the result of need and opportunity structures, so that the likelihood of a transfer increases when one family member needs instrumental or financial help, and another member possesses the necessary resources. At the country level, welfare regimes have been hypothesised to influence exchanges of support, alongside demographic and cultural factors (Szydlik, 2008). The literature on the influence of societal transfers on family exchanges revolves around the concepts of ‘crowding - out’ and ‘crowding - in’ of family support by welfare policies. The ‘crowding - out’ hypothesis predicts that increased public transfers and services to families will make family support less necessary, therefore reducing the overall volume 4
of intergenerational exchange. By contrast, ‘crowding - in’ envisages a scenario in which increased generosity from the state prevents families from becoming overburdened, and allows beneficiaries to redistribute resources to their family members, thus producing an overall increase in intergenerational support (Kunemund & Rein, 1999). Studies of European countries using multilevel analyses of SHARE survey data have found evidence for both these theories (Deindl & Brandt, 2011; Igel, Brandt, Heberkern, & Szydlik, 2009) . In line with these results, the ‘specialisation hypothesis’ between family members and the state in the provision of support has been developed in relation to the European context. Specialisation implies that higher societal transfers to families will crowd out essential, intensive support from relatives, but promote more complementary, less demanding forms of help (Brandt & Deindl, 2013). Specialisation between societal and family transfers is commonly exemplified by a dichotomy between the North and South of Europe. The social democratic welfare regimes in Scandinavia, where family service provision is extensive, display higher frequencies of informal family help, but lower average intensity of support, while in Mediterranean countries, where the degree of state support to families is at the lower end of the spectrum, family care appears to be less frequent, but more intense. The UK and Central European countries are found to perform somewhere in between these two extremes (Igel et al., 2009). Other aspects of the relationship between societal and family transfers remain relatively unexplored, however. First, in societies in which families are mainly responsible for support to dependent members, the relative distribution of resources between generations at the country level is expected to be important in determining exchanges of support between older parents and their adult children. Societal support to families through financial transfers and the provision of services is likely to interact with transfers aimed at individuals, such as pensions and benefits, to influence family exchanges. Therefore, different patterns of intergenerational support may be observed in countries with similarly familialistic welfare orientations if social policies and labour markets allocate resources in different proportions between generations. Secondly, while in Europe basic security in later life is usually guaranteed by public or private pensions and other old-age benefits, these are still relatively underdeveloped in East Asia. The distribution of economic resources between generations is likely to differ substantially between the two contexts, which in turn may result in different regimes of intergenerational family exchange. 5
Recommend
More recommend
