---
title: "Who will do the caring? (research idea)"
description: "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?"
url: https://scholar4ai.com/ideas/long-term-care-workforce
markdown_url: https://scholar4ai.com/ideas/long-term-care-workforce.md
license: CC BY-NC 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/)
share_text: "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."
date: "2026-10-23"
updated: "2026-10-23"
status: "seed"
tags: ["economics", "health", "labor"]
keywords: ["elderly care", "long-term care insurance", "informal care"]
---

# 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 per month, Oct 23 – Oct 26* | Papers, last 36 months |
|---|---:|---:|---|---:|
| elderly care | 5 | #393 | 1, 2, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1, 0, 1, 2, 1, 2, 1, 1, 2, 2, 2, 0, 0, 5, 0, 2, 1, 3, 1, 0, 2, 1, 3, 0, 1, 0, 2, 2, 4, 3 | 45 |
| long-term care insurance | 0 | – | 0, 0, 1, 0, 1, 1, 1, 2, 0, 1, 2, 0, 0, 1, 1, 2, 1, 0, 1, 2, 1, 1, 1, 3, 2, 4, 1, 0, 1, 0, 0, 2, 1, 2, 0, 1, 0 | 37 |
| informal care | 2 | #1303 | 1, 0, 0, 1, 0, 0, 1, 2, 1, 0, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 2, 0, 0, 2, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1, 0, 2, 1, 1 | 16 |

## Cite this page

Scholar4AI. (2026). Who will do the caring?. Journal Research Rankings. Retrieved October 23, 2026, from https://scholar4ai.com/ideas/long-term-care-workforce

```bibtex
@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}
}
```

License: CC BY-NC 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/).