CERGAS Seminar "Meeting Unmet Needs, Fighting Loneliness and Depression: The Challenge of Europe's Aging Population on Long-Term Care Services."

Europe is undergoing a significant demographic transition, which is affecting the provision of long-term care (LTC) services and potentially exacerbating disparities in access to care. This demographic shift, coupled with the weakening of traditional family-based caregiving structures and an underdeveloped public LTC system in several European countries, poses challenges to meeting the growing care needs of the elderly population. Despite extensive research on informal care and formal LTC, little attention has been paid to the relationship between unmet LTC needs and emotional well-being, particularly loneliness and its long-term effects on mental health. This study seeks to address this gap by examining how unmet LTC needs among elderly individuals with disabilities, combined with the isolation imposed during the COVID-19 pandemic, have contributed to heightened feelings of loneliness and, in turn, depression.

Using data from the eighth and ninth waves of the Survey of Health, Aging, and Retirement in Europe (SHARE) and the SHARE Corona Survey (first and second wave), we employed a simultaneous equation model to explore the links between pre-existing unmet LTC needs, the onset or exacerbation of loneliness during the pandemic, and long-term mental health outcomes.

Our findings suggest that unmet LTC needs not only increased older adults' vulnerability to loneliness during the pandemic but also had a lasting impact on their mental well-being, contributing to a higher risk of depression in the year following the COVID-19 pandemic. These results underscore the importance of addressing both physical and emotional care needs in the development of comprehensive LTC strategies, particularly in the context of an aging population and future public health crises.

 

Cinzia Di Novi is an Associate Professor in Public Economics at the Department of Economics and Management, University of Pavia, and the current President of the Italian Health Economics Association (AIES) for the 2024-2026 term. From 2021 to 2024, she served as a Quantitative Policy Analyst on Impact Evaluation at the Joint Research Centre of the European Commission (JRC CC-ME) in Ispra. She is also a member of the Executive Committee of the Society of Economics of the Household (SEHO) and an External Member of the Health, Econometrics, and Data Group (HEDG) at the University of York, as well as a member of the Scientific Committee of the APHEC Research Centre at the University of Genoa.

Her research focuses on health economics, the economics of aging, policy evaluation, and applied micro-econometrics. Her work has been published in leading international journals, including Health Economics, Health Policy, European Journal of Health Economics, Economics and Human Biology, and the Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization.