Gender and the Total Work of Older Workers in Asia

In Asia, aging countries with slow population growth worry about a lack of workers in the futureand see older people’s labor as a potential solution. However, this leaves out the work that manyolder people already do—unpaid care work. Drawing on data from Bangladesh, India, Mongolia,and Thailand, the estimates in this paper show that older people, especially older women, aredoing a great deal of work caring for others. In this case, policies that aim to increase overallmarket labor force effort by increasing the market labor of older people may underachieve theirgoals if they do not account for the older people’s unpaid care work responsibilities. Finally, weuse the estimates of the older people’s unpaid care work to think about investments in the paidcare economy that might be needed to replace unpaid care work of the older people if theyincrease labor market effort but not total work. These simple calculations indicate that the scaleof investment required is manageable