International Comparative Research Concerning Gender and Living Costs for the Elderly

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This study is a comparative analysis of data in Japan and six other countries with regard to income for living expenses of the elderly. The Japanese data is based on the National Survey of Family Income and Expenditure, a set of anonymously- processed microdata provided by the Research Center for Information and Statistics of Social Science, Institute of Economic Research, Hitotsubashi University. The data on the six countries was collected by the Luxembourg Income Study (LIS) with a focus on Germany, Italy, the UK, Denmark, the U.S. and Taiwan.The following three items were analyzed. The first is household patterns of the elderly population. The second is the income configurations of the poor and non-poor. The third is the estimated relative poverty rate in income. The following paragraph outlines the analysis results of the second and third items.First, non-poor single elderly household and elderly married couple households in six countries except for Taiwan have multiple income sour … More ces. The sources are categorized into four groups by combination of main income sources. In the case of poor elderly households in the same six countries excluding Taiwan, social insurance benefits (public pension) make up 80-90% of the total income sources. Second, the income configuration of non-poor single elderly households and elderly married couple households in Japan changed from the American-style employment-plus-pension model to the German- and Italian- style social insurance-centered model in the fifteen years from 1989 to 2004. It is notable, however, that non-poor single elderly women in Japan have a higher percentage of market income than their male counterparts. This suggests that elderly Japanese women need to continue working longer than men to maintain their non-poor standard of living. Third, the relative poverty rate of all elderly Japanese people is 14.5 %, which means that one out of seven the elderly is relatively poor. This rate means that Japan ranks in fourth place from the top among the seven countries. The relative poverty rate of the elderly single women in Japan is 36.7%, following Taiwan (62.6%) and the U.S.(45.7%). Less