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Blessing or Burden: The Elderly and Household Welfare in Ghana

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Abstract

Demographic projections globally indicate an increase in the elderly population due to declining mortality rates resulting from technological advancement and improvement in medicine. This study estimates the extra cost of an elderly household member. Further, it examines the relationship and mechanism between the elderly and household welfare in Ghana using data from the sixth and seventh rounds of the Ghana Living Standard Survey (GLSS6 and GLSS7). Based on the standard of living approach, the study estimates the extra cost of an elderly member at 24% (US$580) and 8% (US$131) of annual household consumption expenditures in 2012/2013 and 2016/2017, respectively. Disaggregation of the results based on location indicates that rural households with an elderly member incur higher extra costs than urban households. The estimation results showed that the presence of an elderly member reduced household welfare by approximately 4%. The result is robust to alternative estimation methods and further indicated that time poverty is the main channel through which elderly members influence household welfare.

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Fig. 1

Source: Authors construction using Ghana Living Standard Survey (GLSS) datasets

Fig. 2

Source: Authors construction using Ghana Living Standard Survey (GLSS) datasets

Fig. 3
Fig. 4

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Data Availability

The data is available upon request.

Notes

  1. Some of the costs associated with taking care of the elderly include emotional (extreme stress and mentally draining) and physical (strain on the body with sore muscles) costs.

  2. The administrative regions of Ghana as of the time of the survey was ten but currently, new regions have been created bringing the total number of regions to 16.

  3. The standard of living index is an “independent metric of material hardship such as the ability to make ends meet or the ownership of consumer durables” (Zaidi & Burchardt, 2005, pp. 3–4).

  4. Following the example of Asuman et al. (2021). the standard of living index is constructed based on household ownership of assets such as furniture, sewing machine, cooking stove (kerosene, gas, and electric), refrigerator, freezer, air-condition, electric fan, radio, cassette player, CD player, home theatre, VC and VCD player, desktop and laptop computers, digital camera, satellite dish, washing machine, television, video camera, electric iron, bicycle. motorcycle, car, microwave oven, blender, vacuum cleaner, rice cooker, toaster, electric kettle, water heater, mobile phone, tablet, generator and bed. Additional variables included in the index are type of toilet facilities, main construction materials of walls, roofs, and main source of lighting and cooking fuels in the household.

  5. The Bank of Ghana exchange rate at the time of the survey (2016/2017) is GHS 4.271 to 1 USD at the end of January 2017. This translates to an extra cost of US$131 (95% CI 7–265).

  6. The Bank of Ghana exchange rate at the time of the survey (2012/2013) is and GHS1.905 to 1USD at the end of January 2013. This translates to US$2474 (95% CI 1516–3525).

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Acknowledgements

This study is made possible through data support from the Ghana Statistical Service (SSS). The authors are grateful for financial support received by the GSS from the Government of Ghana, Department for International Development (DFID) and the Dutch Government through the International Development Assistance (IDA) and the Statistics for Results Facility Catalytic Fund (SRF-CF) which was managed by the World Bank under the Ghana Statistical Development Program (GSDP). The authors express their appreciation for the administrative support offered by the CSIR-Savanna Agricultural Research Institute. Finally, we wish to express our profound gratitude to the anonymous reviewers whose contribution has led to a major improvement of this manuscript.

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  1. Socio-Economic Section, CSIR-Savanna Agricultural Research Institute, Ghana P.O. Box TL 52, Tamale, Ghana

    Edward Martey

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  1. Edward Martey
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All persons who meet authorship criteria are listed as authors, and all authors certify that they have participated sufficiently in the work to take public responsibility for the content, including participation in the concept, design, analysis, writing, or revision of the manuscript. Furthermore, each author certifies that this material or similar material has not been and will not be submitted to or published in any other publication before its appearance in the Social Indicators Research. The Conception and design of study, acquisition of data, analysis and/or interpretation of data, drafting the manuscript, revising the manuscript critically for important intellectual content, and Approval of the version of the manuscript to be published was carried out by EM.

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Appendix

Appendix

See Tables 10, 11.

Table 10 The cost of living with elderly in Ghana
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Table 11 Fixed effects regressions of natural log of consumption expenditures per AEU
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Martey, E. Blessing or Burden: The Elderly and Household Welfare in Ghana. Soc Indic Res 162, 803–827 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11205-021-02871-9

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