Publicly Funded and Family-Friend Care in the Case of Long-Term Illness: The Role of the Spouse

In recent years, considerable attention has been devoted to the value of unpaid work in the economy. One very important aspect of unpaid work is caregiving for chronically ill or disabled people and the question of whether or not family-and-friend caregiving eases the burden on the publicly funded system. Using data from the 1996 General Social Survey, this paper investigates the extent to which the presence of a spouse of a senior aged 55 and …