Intergenerational Transfers and Productive Ageing in a Cross-National Comparative Perspective
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London School of Economics and Political Science Intergenerational transfers and productive ageing in a cross-national comparative perspective Ginevra Floridi A thesis submitted to the Department of Social Policy of the London School of Economics and Political Science for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy London, June 2019 1 Declaration I certify that the thesis I have presented for examination for the MPhil/PhD degree of the London School of Economics and Political Science is solely my own work other than where I have clearly indicated that it is the work of others (in which case the extent of any work carried out jointly by me and any other person is clearly identified in it). The copyright of this thesis rests with the author. Quotation from it is permitted, provided that full acknowledgement is made. This thesis may not be reproduced without my prior written consent. I warrant that this authorisation does not, to the best of my belief, infringe the rights of any third party. I declare that my thesis consists of 65,717 words excluding references. Statement of conjoint work I confirm that Chapter 3 was jointly co-authored with Professor Benjamin Lauderdale and I contributed the majority of this work. Specifically, I am responsible for 50% of the conception of the idea, research design and analysis, and for 100% of the data collection, data management, interpretation of the results and writing of the manuscript (on which I received advice and feedback from both of my supervisors). 2 Abstract Internationally, concerns with the implications of population ageing have led to growing attention being paid to the economic contributions and dependency of older adults. Research on intergenerational support investigates older adults’ exchanges of money and time with their family members, while productive ageing refers to their economic contributions to the broader society. So far, research on these topics at the aggregate level has mainly focussed on Europe and the United States (US). Comparisons of intergenerational transfer regimes are usually made between welfare states in Europe, while productive ageing is a US-centred concept that is not necessarily translatable to societies with different socio-cultural characteristics. In addition, only a few studies of individual-level relationships link intergenerational family transfers with older adults’ participation in economically productive roles. This thesis addresses the gaps in the literature cited above with four empirical papers on intergenerational support, productive ageing and the interrelations between them in a cross-national comparative perspective. I use data from the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe, the Korean Longitudinal Study of Ageing, and a conjoint survey experiment. In the first paper, I compare transfers of financial, practical and coresidential support between parents aged 50 and above and their children in Italy and South Korea, two countries with similarly familistic approaches to welfare but different levels of social protection towards older adults. The second empirical paper develops a method for weighting and aggregating indicators into a composite scale based on a conjoint experiment on experts, which I use to compare operationalisations of productive ageing between a group of Italian and a group of South Korean academics. In the third paper, I compare the factors associated with participation in paid work and informal caregiving among middle-aged and older Italian and South Korean parents, focussing on the role of socioeconomic status and transfers of support with adult children. In the fourth paper, I study the association between daily grandchild care and grandparents’ labour supply in Europe with a focus on gender and socioeconomic differences. Overall, the findings highlight the role of country-level policy and culture as well as gender, socioeconomic resources and family transfers in influencing older adults’ contributions to welfare and the economy. 3 Acknowledgements In the four years since I started working on this thesis, I have been surrounded by great mentors, friends and colleagues. I will start by thanking Emily Grundy, Benjamin Lauderdale and Stephen Jenkins for their invaluable supervision. I am grateful to Emily for her guidance and advice in the first two years of PhD, and for her continued support after she left the LSE. I thank Ben for his patience and for the great experience of writing a paper with someone from a different discipline. Last but certainly not least, I am grateful to Stephen for being my supervisor in the last two years and for the super-human attention to detail in all his feedback on my work. A massive thank you goes to all my colleagues from the Social Policy PhD, with whom I have shared the good and the bad times, and shots from the communal Polish vodka on both types of occasions. Special mentions go to my friends Ewa Batyra, Filippo Temporin, Laura Sochas, Diego Alburez-Gutierrez, Ellie Suh, Cristian Crespo, Rishita Nandagiri, Marco Palillo, Antonella Bancalari, Philippa Mullins, Sam Mohun- Himmelweit, Tze-Ming Mok, Julia Philipp, Joaquin Prieto, Joe Strong and Michaela Sedovic. I would like to thank all those who have taken the time to give me feedback on my work, starting from Jane Lewis and Anne West in the first-year seminars. I am grateful to Giorgio di Gessa, Ben Wilson and Alice Goisis for being exceptional role models in research, teaching, and life in general. Special thanks also to Jouni Kuha for his generosity with his time. I am grateful to all participants in the ALPHA research seminars for their feedback on my presentations. Thank you to my friends from the School of Public Health at Seoul National University for three amazing months of research visit, especially Hyeonju Kim for helping me with pretty much everything. Finally, friends and family: I am enormously grateful to Vicky, Elliott, Tim, Ikumi, Ryan and Shomari, and obviously to Tom, for continuing to deal with me throughout the years. I could not have wished for a better group of people to have around while working on this thesis. I thank my parents Sabrina and Giuliano, my brother Giacomo, and my grandad Dino for all their love and support. This thesis is dedicated to my grandmother Anna, who inspired much of it and whom I miss very much. 4 For my grandmother 5 Contents 1. Introduction ......................................................................................................................... 12 1.1. Ageing, intergenerational support and activity participation ............................................. 12 1.1.1. Concepts and definitions ............................................................................................. 12 1.1.2. Why study older adults’ contributions to society in a comparative perspective? ....... 14 1.2. Intergenerational transfers of support: review of the literature .......................................... 16 1.2.1. Welfare states, familism and intergenerational transfer regimes ............................... 19 1.2.2. Cross-national comparative research on intergenerational transfer regimes ............ 22 1.2.3. Individual motives and consequences of intergenerational support ........................... 27 1.3. Productive ageing: review of the literature ........................................................................ 31 1.3.1 Theoretical perspectives and issues of definition and measurement ........................... 32 1.3.2. Empirical work on the determinants of productive ageing ......................................... 38 1.3.3. Cross-national comparative research on productive ageing ...................................... 41 1.4. Countries under study and approaches to cross-national comparisons .............................. 43 1.4.1. Two approaches to cross-national comparisons ......................................................... 44 1.4.2. Data availability, opportunities and challenges ......................................................... 46 1.5. Structure of the thesis ......................................................................................................... 50 2. Social policies and intergenerational support in Italy and South Korea ....................... 53 2.1. Introduction ........................................................................................................................ 54 2.2. Conceptualising intergenerational support ......................................................................... 55 2.3. Contextualising intergenerational support in Italy and South Korea ................................. 58 2.3.1. Reliance on intergenerational family support ............................................................. 59 2.3.2. Differences in societal transfers to older and younger generations ........................... 62 2.4. Comparing intergenerational support between Italy and Korea ......................................... 66 2.4.1. Datasets and analysis .................................................................................................. 67 2.4.2. Financial support ........................................................................................................ 68 2.4.3. Provision of care for grandchildren ........................................................................... 71 2.4.4. Care and help from children to parents ...................................................................... 72 2.4.5. Intergenerational coresidence ...................................................................................