Dear Colleagues,

We are currently organising a Special Issue entitled “The Economics of Caring” in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health. IJERPH is a peer-reviewed scientific journal that publishes articles and communications in the interdisciplinary area of environmental health sciences and public health. For detailed information on the journal, we refer you to https://0-www-mdpi-com.brum.beds.ac.uk/journal/ijerph.

From the very beginning of the lives of human beings, care is an essential and unavoidable activity. This task conditions the behaviour and roles assigned to each household member and the knowledge, training, and responsibility that accompany those roles. In this sense, caring transcends not only the action of providing help or attention to the caregiver, but also restricts the development of another potential activity of the caregiver (for example, employment, training, leisure, etc.). The sociodemographic changes we are experiencing and the facts discussed above have pushed states into rethinking the social protection systems that must be offered, raising questions about what kind of protection to give, who should give it (unpaid care work or paid care work), and how it should be provided. Finally, all this has an impact on the micro-, meso-, and macroeconomic spheres of families and, therefore, on the economic structure and well-being of each society.

Now we are in the year 2020, which represents the closure of a decade of profound revolutions in economic, financial, and political thinking derived from the subprime crisis among many other factors, accompanied by other equal or more intense riots in the social field, where family structures and social and health services have been questioned in terms of efficiency, equity, and extension or reduction of social rights. Therefore, within this context, analysis and evaluation of the tasks of caring for people with disabilities or dependency, caring for the elderly, or caring for people with diseases becomes a challenge for researchers in health economics. Allowing the economic impact of different casuistic trends that are involved in care to be made visible is necessary to be able to give the political decision-maker valuable, relevant, and complete information for the decision-making process and thus be able to design efficient actions that converge with the needs demanded by societies.

Finally, it is essential to mention that the economics of caring has been an increasing topic of interest in the last two decades. We should note that in submitting a query in PubMed with the text “economics” or “economic” and “caring” or “care” in the title or abstract of the indexed articles, we find that there is a significant increase in these works during the last decade of approximately 8.5% per year, reaching the figure of 3962 articles for the year 2019. Therefore, it is now an excellent time to provide, in a monograph, a global perspective of the subject, with an overview of the most-affected countries and of the latest methodological advances. In addition, other issues of interest will be addressed, including the following:

International perspectives of the economics of caring;

Specific studies for illness or particular population segments involved in care, including all kinds of costs (direct costs, e.g., healthcare costs; indirect costs, e.g., productivity losses; and intangible costs);

Methods for measuring the effects of care on health and equity, and for evaluating the impact of policies to address the need for care;

Impact of caring on the health of the caregivers;

Present and future trends of informal care: continuation and survival or extinction?

Informal and formal care: complementary or substitutive?

We welcome the submission of reviews, original research articles, short communications, case studies, and other kinds of articles targeting any of these core research questions and beyond. We would be delighted to attract as many diverse submissions representing different geographies and jurisdictions as possible.

Prof. Pablo Moya Martinez
Prof. Raúl del Pozo Rubio
Guest Editors

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