Cash Transfers and Guaranteed Minimum Income Programs:
Research, Evaluation, and Policy
Prague, Czech Republic
September 9-10, 2024
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“Cash Transfers in Long-term Care: Exploring (Non-)Take-up”
August Österle, WU Vienna University of Economics and Business
Cash transfers have become a common and further spreading approach in long-term care policies across the globe. While these programs share the idea of supporting people in need of long-term care, the concrete features differ widely. Cash transfers are given to care users or informal care givers, they can be means-tested or not, linked or not linked to pre-defined uses, and they differ much in the breadth and substance of the definition of care needs. Not least, cash transfers might be designed as an alternative to services (requiring users to opt), or as a resource to (co-)pay for services. Hence, cash transfers follow distinct logics and can work as income support or as a measure to pay for specific care services.
While research on the use and the effectiveness of long-term care services has substantially grown in recent decades, the literature on the take-up, the use and the effectiveness of cash benefits is still limited. This paper focuses on the (non-)take-up of cash transfers in long-term care. In a first step, the paper categorises cash transfer programs in long-term care policies from around the world, addressing underlying principles of the respective programs and criteria defining access to the programs. Secondly, it reviews the literature on (non-)take-up of cash benefits – that is mostly studying means-tested rather than universal benefits – in the light of the specificities of long-term care. Building on these conceptual parts, the paper then synthesizes the literature on the (non-)take-up and the uses of cash transfers in long-term care and identifies ways forward in evaluating take-up, use and effectiveness of cash transfers in long-term care.
The abstract is linked to the article “Take-up and distribution of a universal cash benefit: The case of the Austrian long-term care allowance”, recently published in the Journal of Social Policy (online first: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0047279423000375 ) and co-authored by the authors of this paper proposal.