Family Economic Burden of Elderly Chronic Diseases: Evidence from China

Chronic diseases among the elderly and their huge economic burden on family have caught much attention from economists and sociologists over the past decade in China. This study measured the economic burden of elderly chronic disease (ECD) in families using the China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study (CHARLS) data set from Peking University (China). We studied some aspects of this burden, including health-service utilization, out-of-pocket expenditure on inpatient and outpatient, total family expenditures on items, and labor force participation rates of family members, etc. Some interesting things were found, for example, the additional annual expenditure on inpatient care (per member) in ECD-families was 37 to 45 percent of the annual expenditure in the control group; the labor-force participation rate in ECD-families was 2.4 to 3.3 percent of points lower than in the control group.