Costa Rican Health and Retirement Survey

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DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): This application proposes to field two waves of a new, nationally representative longitudinal Costa Rican Health and Retirement Survey targeting Costa Rican adults near retirement age, born 1945-1955. This would complement an on-going longitudinal household survey of older Costa Ricans born before 1945 (CRELES). A number of factors make Costa Rica an important site for the study of older adults' health and economic status: (a) Costa Rica has higher life expectancy than even the United States, with lower age-specific mortality rates among adults. The proposed data would allow unique new insight into life-course social and economic determinants of Costa Rica's success, as well as investigation of the bi-directional relationships between health and work among older adults in this exemplar population. (b) Past work has found Costa Rica to have unusually small socioeconomic gradients in health and economic well-being. This project is designed to allow deeper exploration of the role of public and private support underlying these remarkable inequality patterns. (c) Costa Rica experienced one of the earliest and fastest fertility transitions in the developing world, with total fertility dropping from 7.3 births in 1960 to 3.7 by 1976. By focusing on the parental cohorts experiencing this decline, this survey can uniquely advance understanding of the long- term demographic dividends of fertility decline. (d) Costa Rica provides a particularly rich study setting due to the ability to retrospectively and prospectively link the proposed microdata with high quality registries of vital events such as deaths, creating the ability to follow the sampled cohort at low cost indefinitely into the future. PUBLIC HEALTH RELEVANCE The proposed project would generate a unique new dataset for studying the determinants of longevity in a country considered a success story for having achieved "good health at low cost." Furthermore, it would enable detailed study of social and economic conditions surrounding retirement in a country on the leading edge of the aging transition in Latin America.