The high-income countries are aging – the number of people older than 80 in the 37 OECD countries
is expected to climb from over 57 million in 2016 to over 1.2 billion in 2050.[1] As a result, the working age population has been shrinking, creating shortages that are already growing into inevitable labor scarcity across sectors. However, the aged care sector’s shortages have been even more elevated due to the increasing number of seniors in need for care. To maintain the current worker-per-patient ratio across OECD countries, the sector will need additional 10 million personal care workers by 2040.[2]
Therefore, OECD governments and industry associations around the world have been paying high-profile attention to labor mobility within the aged-care sector.
Together with partners, LaMP is engaging G20 governments on the issue of labor mobility for elderly care, creating an opportunity to translate the political attention into concrete actions and commitments. Besides our advocacy work, LaMP provides actors within the G20 and others such as the European Commission and Global Aging Network with technical expertise and tools necessary to design and introduce new migration programs for the sector.
As a result of this work, LaMP seeks to secure breakthrough commitments by key actors to address elderly-care labor scarcity through cross-border labor mobility. Our goal is to support emergence of concrete policy changes and investments that create more and better elderly-care job opportunities for foreign-born workers.
[1] OECD (2020), Who Cares? Attracting and Retaining Care Workers for the Elderly, OECD Health Policy Studies, OECD Publishing, Paris, https://doi.org/10.1787/92c0ef68-en.
[2] OECD (2020), Who Cares? Attracting and Retaining Care Workers for the Elderly, OECD Health Policy Studies, OECD Publishing, Paris, https://doi.org/10.1787/92c0ef68-en.
For more information, contact:
Salvatore Petronella
Zuzana Cepla
