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SOCIAL POLICY, ELDERLY WELLBEING AND CARE

I. Grigoryeva, I. Sizova, O. Parfenova, I. Petuhova

Abstract

This paper describes some basic characteristics of the social policies for the elderly people in four countries, namely Russia, Italy, Finland and the UK. Maian focus is at the analysis of neo-liberal policies impacts on welfare policies: covering a conceptual analysis of some issues as eligibility and risk, transforming models of the social policy and its institutional setups. Modern research agenda includes theorizing, analysis and evaluation of welfare institutions, organizations and policies along with the ways in which they connect with the living conditions of citizens. This embraces welfare provision in a broad sense, including fields such as social policy, social work or elderly care. The authors seek answers to questions of the relationship between economic development, pension systems and welfare, labour and care, renewed centre of a debate in 21 century after classical works by W.Korpi [5], G. Esping-Andersen [11] and P.Abrahamson [1]. We take as indicators of well-being for elderly: low level of dependency, high level of employment (formal and informal) and access for social care. To have job and to be independent in modern world is a very strong factor for social inclusion of the elderly. The attention of society moved from welfare state expansion, to alternative welfare state forms, different kind of cares affected a range of social and economic relations. We can compare level of employment and dependency, age and level of pension and income of older generation. The discussion about place in Human Development Index (HDI) draws upon country-level cases which include England, Italy, Finland and Russia. These countries are high-income developed nations with democratic political systems; they have diverse welfare regimes and political histories, but many differences too. It’s a question, how we can compare different countries, but G.Citroni and A.Sicora [3] and before, Aspalter [2] tried to answer this question. After Esping-Andersen's [5] pathbreaking work, the notion of multiple welfare state regimes spread and has been elaborated on and extended to identify alternative pathways of welfare state expansion. Rapid economic growth has been associated with growing disparities in income distribution. As a result, whereas many high income parents have ample child and elder care and household support, poor families, particularly single mothers who cannot afford childcare often leave children to their own devices. Family fragmentation between rural and urban areas and within cities and megacities associated with massive urbanization means family members are less able to provide care support than in the past. Development of national policies is to address the economic implications of conflicts between “reproductive work” and paid work including affordable public, public-private, private and cooperative child and elder care support systems.

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