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Old-age income security has become one of the most important social policy issues in two East Asian emerging welfare states, South Korea and Taiwan, as they transform at a remarkable pace into societies with a representation of older people approaching that of western countries. During the last two decades, the two countries have developed different forms of social protection for older people. South Korea has expanded social insurance pensions with means-tested benefits, whereas Taiwan has introduced flat-rate old-age allowance programmes that exclude the rich rather than target the poor. much has been written about these programmes, but their actual performance in reducing old-age poverty has not been thoroughly examined. This paper analyses the anti-poverty effect of these programmes, firstly by describing recent developments in the two countries, and secondly by examining headcount poverty rates and the size and incidence of the 'poverty gap' using nationally-representative micro-household datasets. We argue that while the programmes have increasingly reduced old-age income security, the different policy choices have resulted in distinctive welfare outcomes in the two countries. In the final section of the article, we discuss the long-term implications of the recent policy reforms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In South Korea, the number of older adults living alone is rapidly increasing with the growth of the ageing population. Although there is some evidence of a link between financial strain and depression in this population, there is limited empirical evidence on the relationship between food insecurity and depression in older adults living alone despite the fact that they have a high prevalence of food insecurity and tend to seek food assistance. This study aims to investigate whether food insecurity explains depressive symptoms in Korean older adults living alone. We employed data from the Korea Welfare Panel Study collected from a large-scale national sample in South Korea. Our sample consisted of 815 older adults aged 65 or older who lived alone. Conducting ordinary least square regression analyses, we tested the main effect of food insecurity on depression and the interaction effect of food insecurity and low income. We found that the relationship between food insecurity and depressive symptoms differed by low-income status (b = 6.27, p = 0.047). The association was significant only in the low-income group (b = 1.37, p = 0.04). These findings suggest that protecting access to food may be a promising strategy to lessen depressive symptoms associated with financial strain among older adults living alone. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although the proportion of older people using home care services has significantly increased in East Asian countries, the issue of the relationships between older people and home care workers in the East Asian context has received scant attention from scholars. This exploratory qualitative study aims to explore these relationships under the new Korean long-term care insurance system. Semi-structured in-depth interviews were conducted with 22 family carers and private-sector home care service providers (home care workers and provider managers). The findings show that while the majority of family carers interviewed reported that their relationships were good, the majority of service providers' responses were more negative. Service providers stated that they experienced a number of difficulties that affected their relationships with older clients, including excessive demands or sexual harassment by the older people in their care, exposure to unsafe working environments, and poor treatment in terms of pay and conditions. The findings suggest that stable and good relationships between home care workers and their clients have not been secured in Korea's long-term care system. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]