Socioeconomic inequity in long-term care use in Europe

We investigate the determinants of the use of long-term care services provided at home as well as the degree of horizontal inequity that may exist in the use of this type of services for a sample of dependent individuals living in Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden, Italy and Spain, using data from 2006/2007. The results suggest that there is not an equitable distribution of use of formal home care and informal care across the selected countries. Pro-poor inequity is found for formal home care in the Netherlands, Denmark and Sweden while Italy and Sweden shows a pro-rich distribution of use when analyzing nursing/personal home care exclusively. With respect to informal care no evidence of inequity was found for all the countries except Sweden. However, in the case of intensive informal care use pro-poor inequity was found in The Netherlands, Sweden and Italy.