Care Time Diamond and Its Applications to Seven Asian Societies

This paper suggests a quantitative way of analyzing welfare mix in care provision. It is conceptualized as care time diamond which indicates the distribution of care provision between state, market, community and family, measured in time. Welfare states not only de-familialize the caring function of family but also familialize it. The degrees in which the informal care is formalized may be mediated by familial practices and notion or preference towards provision of care. Care time diamond is an effective tool to understand relationship among the four pillars in care provisions and its changes over time.

As a way of applying the approach, it is suggested to distinguish cared time from caring time and gross care time from average care time. We tried to collect care time data from seven Asian societies but only Japan, Korea and Thailand have developed time use survey which is prerequisite for utilization of the approach (on caring time),and Thailand’s data is only about elderly care. Some societies have gross cared time data, and others have gross caring time data. In the mean time, some societies do not have care time data but have cared person data, or data of gross number of children/elderly cared in each sector. Therefore, our discussions focus on Japan and Korea but we draw upon its implications for other societies in Asia. All in all, we highlight the usefulness of the approach as a way to understand the care mix in societal level.