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Comparing the Coordination of Elderly Care Services in European Welfare States (completed)

How Organizational Actors Respond to Marketization Policies

The elderly population is often in need of both healthcare and long-term care (LTC) services. Confronted with an ageing population, European welfare states are struggling with coordinating and integrating services at the interfaces of the two systems. In the last decades, marketization policies in both healthcare and LTC systems have further aggravated coordination problems. Inadequate coordination results in higher costs and lower quality. While various coordinative tools have been implemented in all countries, it is still unclear how far and why welfare states vary systematically in this respect. We expect that the way countries have responded to these challenges depends on the respective institutional settings in healthcare and LTC as well as on trajectories of marketization policies and organizational structures in the field. By systematically taking into account cross-national variations of these dimensions, we are able to provide new evidence and new explanations for cross-national differences in coping with this major challenge among European welfare states.

For further information, please visit the project site at the Mannheim Centre for European Social Research.