AGING IN SINGAPORE : AN EXPLORATORY STUDY ON OLD AGE SOCIAL SUPPORT

Abstract

The proportion of elderly in many developing countries will have increased significantly as we enter into the new millennium. One possible scenario is that many governments would have to deal with new issues such as who should be responsible for taking care of elderly individuals. For countries with some form of social security system available to their elderly population, they would have to meet an increase of demand and it is possible the increased strain may be problematic. This is an interesting issue because it brings to mind the question of who will support the elderly, the State or the Individual. One avenue towards tackling this problem in Singapore is to understand the types of supplement elderly Singaporeans receive. This exploratory study hopes to understand and identify these forms of support. For the purpose of this study, elderly individuals both male and female were sort. Their ages ranged from fifty-five (55) to mid eighties (80+). Individuals who were 55 were considered in the study, as they would have already withdrawn their CPF funds upon reaching retirement and would be able to give a fair assessment of its pros and cons towards old age support. During the course of this study, I have shown that the different forms of support that are available can be categorized into formal and informal. For the former, it comprises CPF and Public Assistance. The latter is made up largely of intergenerational transfers that occur within the family. The data obtained showed that while there was the availability of formal forms of support, demand for familial support remains high among the elderly in the sample. The main form of familial support was that of intergenerational transfers. Here, forms of transfers varied, among adult children, the most common form of transfer was financial assistance. For transfers from aging parents to adult children, transfers were usually in kind, such as child minding or as sources of consultation. I found that there was heterogeneity of motives for transfers from my sample. Some of the more prominent motives include the parental repayment hypothesis, altruism, and old age security hypothesis. These observations show that familial support in the form of intergenerational transfers is an important aspect of social support. Hermalin (1997) points out that there is a useful link between policy and research. Having good research available in the area of aging would allow policy makers to formulate policies that would benefit not just the target population but also the wider population. While this is but an exploratory study, it has however shown that informal support, i.e. intergenerational transfers is an important part of old age support and should not be overlooked or ignored.