Henning Øien

Scandinavian Long-Term Care Financing

In this paper, we compare and analyse the systems for financing long-term care for older people in the Scandinavian countries – Denmark, Norway and Sweden. The three countries share common political traditions of local autonomy and universalism, and these common roots are very apparent when the financing of long-term care is concerned. Nevertheless, the Scandinavian systems for long- term care (LTC) exhibit some important deviations from the idealized “universal welfare state” to which these countries are normally ascribed. For example, user charges tend to be strongly dependent on earnings, which is incoherent with the general norm of flat-rate public services. Also, there is significant regional variation in the level of services provided, which is in direct contrast with the universalist ambitions. Overall, the Scandinavian countries distinguish themselves through their very high reliance on public spending in long-term care. It is unclear to what extent the Scandinavian model for financing of long term care will be sustainable as demographic change progresses in the next few decades.

Careful in the Crisis? Determinants of Older People's Informal Care Receipt in Crisis‐Struck European Countries

Macroeconomic downturns can have an important impact on the receipt of informal and formal long-term care, because recessions increase the number of unemployed and affect net wealth. This paper investigates how the market for informal care changed during and after the Great Recession in Europe, with particular focus on the determinants of care receipt. We use data from the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe, which includes a rich set of variables covering waves before and after the Great Recession. We find evidence of an increase in the availability of informal care after the economic downturn when controlling for year and country fixed effects. This trend is mainly driven by changes in care provision of individuals not cohabiting with the care recipient. We also find evidence of several determinants of informal care receipt changing during the crisis - such as physical needs, personal wealth, and household structures. Copyright

Would Small be More Beautiful in the South African Land Reform

It was white people who, under Apartheid, were the owners and entrepreneurs of South African agriculture, while blacks were reduced to the status of serfs or were pushed into traditional farming on unproductive land in the black homelands. When the Apartheid regime was overthrown in 1994, the new government launched the ambitious plan of redistributing 30 percent of the agricultural land to black farmers. However, hindering this plan was the fact that hardly any black people had the agricultural experience, management capacity, or capital to run the large-scale farms — part of the price of 80 years of systematic discrimination that no political intervention can undo in the short run.