Who will do the caring? (research idea)

Who will do the caring?

Elderly care, long-term care insurance and informal care appear on 75 recent papers, with 22 in the last quarter against about 17 per quarter before, and 24 carry a labour, worker or immigration keyword. Ageing countries need millions more care workers. Does paying more bring them, does immigration fill the gap, and what do robots change?

What prompted this#

Since October 2025, 75 papers carry a long-term-care, elderly-care, nursing-home or caregiving keyword (41 in economics journals, 16 in AI): "elderly care" on 19, "long-term care insurance" on 14, "long-term care" on 9, "informal care" on 8. Twenty-four of them also carry a labour, worker, wage, workforce, immigration, robot or informal-care keyword. The quarter to September 2026 had 22 such papers against about 17 per quarter earlier.

Questions#

When care wages rise, as in Japan's and Germany's recent increases, how many workers enter from other sectors, and does turnover fall?
Do care-worker visas raise the supply without lowering wages for existing workers?
Do families cut informal care when formal care becomes available, and does that raise women's employment?

Data that could help#

Care sector employment and wages, long-term care insurance claims (Japan, Germany, Korea), visa statistics and household surveys with caregiving questions.

Next step#

Compare care-worker employment growth across Japanese prefectures after the national pay increases, using differences in the local wage gap to other sectors.

Related research activity#

The keywords this note follows, in the tracked finance, accounting, economics, management, operations research and AI journals as of 2026-10-26
Keyword	Papers, last 30 days	Rank	Papers, last 36 months
elderly care	5	#393	45
long-term care insurance	0	–	37
informal care	2	#1303	16

@misc{scholar4ai-ideas-long-term-care-workforce, author = {{Scholar4AI}}, title = {Who will do the caring?}, year = {2026}, howpublished = {\url{https://scholar4ai.com/ideas/long-term-care-workforce}}, urldate = {2026-10-23}, note = {Journal Research Rankings; data from OpenAlex (CC0); licensed CC BY-NC 4.0} }