Impact Of Home-and Community-based Elderly Care Service Pilot On Household Consumption

According to the "14th Five-Year Plan for Healthy Aging",the proportion of the population aged 60 and above in China will reach more than 20%during the"14th Five-Year Plan" period,which means that there will be at least one elderly person in every five people and the whole society will enter the stage of moderate aging.In the context of increasing aging and increasing pressure on the elderly,it is a practical issue for policy makers to evaluate whether home-and community-based elderly care service policies can affect household consumption and optimize the consumption structure.The home-and community-based elderly care service pilot is an important progressive reform policy for the construction of China’s social old-age security system.From 2016 to 2020,it has been approved by five batches of pilot cities(districts),and the pilot areas have covered all provinces in the mainland.It is a concentrated embodiment of the country’s efforts to strengthen the elderly.Based on the micro-panel data of the China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study(CHARLS)in 2013,2015 and 2018,this paper used the difference-in-differences(DID)approach to analyze the implementation effect of two pilot cities of homeand community-based elderly care services in 2016 and 2017,and drew a series of research conclusions.First of all,the benchmark regression results of DID show that,after controlling for individual and family characteristics,the total household consumption level has significantly increased by 6 percentage points under the coverage of home-and community-based elderly care service pilot.This paper further divides household consumption types into basic consumption,enjoyment consumption and development consumption.It is found that the implementation of pilot policies has a positive effect on basic consumption and development consumption,and the effect is statistically significant.This indicates that the coverage of home-and communitybased elderly care services can make elderly families increase the purchase of daily consumption goods and pay more attention to the investment of human capital.However,the pilot policy has a significant negative relationship with the enjoyment consumption.The pilot policy can make the elderly get humanistic care and support in leisure and entertainment life,so that the family enjoyment consumption is significantly reduced.In this paper the robustness of the empirical results in a series of inspection,including:inspection of event study,the placebo parallel trend of random imaginary treatment group,the adjustment treatment group and control group in the urban sample,excluding other policy interference and other robustness testing method,robustness test results prove that the credibility of research conclusion.Secondly,from the perspective of economic characteristics,health characteristics and social characteristics,this paper discusses the heterogeneity of the implementation effects of home-and community-based elderly care services.The specific discussion includes the following points:First,whether there are differences in the implementation effects of home-and community-based elderly care services in different income groups.Second,the difference of the implementation effect of pilot policies under different household consumption levels.Third,whether the elderly care services have different effects on the elderly families with different health conditions.Fourth,the differences of policy effects between home-and community-based elderly care services in terms of whether to participate in social activities,different living styles and frequency of meeting with children.Then,this paper tests the mechanism of the implementation effect of the pilot policy of home-and community-based elderly care services.Through three channels of family care,children’s economic support and preventive savings,it is found that home-and community-based elderly care have a "substitution" effect on family elderly care,a "complementary" effect on institutional elderly care,and a "crowding in" effect on children’s economic support,thus increasing family consumption.In addition,on the basis of the conclusions,this paper puts forward relevant policy suggestions,mainly from the system construction,market participation,integrated development,publicity and promotion of the discussion.Finally,the possible innovations of this paper are as follows:First,the current research on the social pension security system is mostly focused on the discussion of economic security,such as pension insurance and pension,while the research on service security is less,and there is no relevant literature to discuss the impact of home and community pension services on family consumption.Therefore,this paper fills the gap in the research on the social pension service security system to a certain extent.Secondly,most of the existing literature studies the impact of household consumption from the perspective of household income,family size,age structure,years of education and other family internal characteristics.However,the discussion on the relationship between home-and community-based elderly care and family consumption is not sufficient.This paper has deeply discussed the effect of the establishment of the pilot site on family consumption,which is a good supplement to the research on the influencing factors of family level consumption.Third,this study uses CHARLS micro panel data,with the pilot projects in 2016 and 2017 as the exogenous impact of policies,to investigate the impact of the implementation of home-and community-based elderly care services policies on family consumption and its mechanism from the perspective of micro families,and to refine the effect of policy implementation.