In Singapore, Children Struggle to Care for Aging Parents. NewsWire

NewsWire: 4/30/21

• In Singapore, it’s single women who increasingly bear the brunt of caring for aging parents. And the cost of that care keeps rising, which makes the pressure even heavier. (The Washington Post)
• NH: As Singapore’s population ages, children are stepping in to look after their aging parents. As this article points out, the majority of these caregivers (60%) are women. And because so many of their parents are in their 90s (Singapore's life expectancy, at 83.4 years at birth, is just behind Japan's), many of the children are elderly themselves.
• The daughters may still be working, but even if they are, many end up scaling back their hours at work. To help them, the government has created an “aging in place” plan that provides up to $15,000 to caregivers who live within three miles of their parents.
• But this amount doesn’t come close to covering the costs of elder care, which keep climbing. By 2030, average annual health care expenses for seniors in Singapore are expected to rise to $37,000--which is expensive even in an affluent urban economy like Singapore's.
• Singapore is far from alone in facing the challenges of an aging population amid a sharply declining fertility rate. But the culture of filial piety means that, unlike in other countries, there’s more pressure on children to provide the care. Singapore is one of four Asian countries that has enacted filial support laws, which means that you are legally responsible for supporting your parents. The others are China, Bangladesh, and India. According to a 2015 report by the Global Aging Institute that surveyed respondents in ten East Asian countries, the majority of retirees in the Asia-Pacific region live with their children. (South Korea is a notable exception.)
• Yet it appears that most people would prefer that children play a smaller role in ensuring their elders’ retirement security. When asked who should be responsible for providing income to retired people, those in Singapore were more likely than those in the other nine countries to say grown children--but the figure was still pretty low (13%). A somewhat larger share (34%) said grown children should be mostly responsible for personal care.
• Still, when it comes to providing income, the most popular answer (48%) was retirees themselves, followed by the government (30%). Expectations vary throughout East Asia: South Koreans are the most likely to say that retirees should provide for themselves (61%), while Thailand and the Philippines are the most likely to say the government (both 66%).

• Here's an interesting question: If so many of the higher-income East Asian societies so strongly favor people saving for their own retirement income, why have so few of today's elderly done so? The reason is simple. Forty or fifty years ago, when these frail elders were young and could have saved, they earned subsistence wages in low-income economies with no governmental or financial institutions which could facilitate payroll deductions, bank deposits, or pensions. Everyone just accepted an informal pay-as-you-go "system" in which adult children directly supported any parent who was lucky enough to have a long life.
• Today, the working-age adults in these economies have vastly higher real incomes and most favor the notion that individuals should be responsible for their own retirement. Most are themselves saving fat shares of their income and investing that income in their own future. Yet they are also expected to support their own parents, who never had that chance. In a sense, you might say that moving from a pay-as-you-go retirement system to a funded retirement system requires them to provide for two retirements--their parents' and their own. It's little wonder that so many say they can't afford to have children.
• Government could intervene and provide the sort of pay-as-you-go social security system that so many western societies have adopted. That idea is indeed popular in many of the less-affluent East Asian countries like China, Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand, and Vietnam. And some of the more affluent, like South Korea, have adopted a fairly generous pay-as-you-go safety net. But public support for personal savings remains surprisingly strong, even in the face of all the heavy burdens faced by working-age adults.
• Adopting a pay-as-you-go system would lighten the burden by weakening the need to save. But most of these adults understand that high national savings rates are one big reason their economies became so productive to begin with. Which may be why they choose to bear the current discomfort.