How Do the Elderly in Taiwan Fare Cross-Nationally? Evidence from the Luxembourg Income Study Project

 Peter Saunders and Timothy M. Smeeding

Social Policy Research Centre, Discussion Paper, No.81

Abstract

This paper uses microdata from the Luxembourg Income Study (LIS) to estimate and compare four dimensions of the well-being of the aged in Taiwan and eight other countries - the United States, Japan, Australia, Poland, Finland, Germany, Hungary and Canada. Together, these nine countries cover a broad variety of economic experience, institutional development and cultural tradition which complicate the task of comparing them. The four dimensions studied are (relative) poverty, income distribution, relative economic status and income composition. A key focus of the analysis and a significant feature of the results is the important role which living arrangements (and, to a lesser extent, age and gender) play in determining the relative economic status of the aged in each country. This issue is explored more thoroughly in Taiwan, where the (admittedly exploratory and preliminary) analysis illustrates how shared living arrangements (and hence shared housing costs) represent an important part of the overall safety net for the elderly.

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