关键词: 养老服务, 有效供给, 政府补贴政策, 动态博弈

Abstract: According to China’s Seventh National Census, the percentage of population aged over 60 years had reached 18.7%, up by 5.44 percentage over the Sixth National Census. Meanwhile, the number of empty-nesters and disabled elderly has also been increasing. Due to the one-child policy, population dependency ratio rises markedly and demand for elderly services continues to grow. Thus, accelerating the development of elderly services system is an important task of the national positive ageing strategy. Since the elderly service industry is characterized by large investment, small operating profits, and long payback period, it is necessary to attract private capital through financial subsidy. In fact, the “Opinions on Strengthening the Efforts to Tackle Population Aging in the New Era” issued by the State Council proposed to increase government spending in senior services from central budge and lottery public welfare funds. Despite increasing government funding for senior services, the funding gap continues to grow in the face of rapid aging. Therefore, how to use financial resources more effectively to improve the quality of elderly services, raise consumption of elderly services, and promote the development of the elderly service industry has become an urgent issue for the future.
The current subsidy policy can be divided into two main categories, namely supply-side subsidy and demand-side subsidy, where supply-side subsidy is provided to service providers, such as operating or construction subsidy, and demand-side subsidy is offered directly to seniors, such as elderly service vouchers or cash. There is no uniform subsidy scheme in China, and the subsidy policy varies from province to province. Given this situation, government is interested in the following questions: Which subsidy policy is preferable to achieve the above objectives? Is it better to grant seniors demand-side incentives to generate additional demand or to allocate more resources to providers to improve service capability? Can the same subsidy scheme coordinate the system consisting of home-based, community and institutional service providers? To answer these questions, this paper constructs a three-stage dynamic game model including the government, service provider and the elderly, and studies how to design subsidy policy to maximize the effective supply of elderly services and promote the construction of system coordinated by home-based, community and institutional elderly care service under the limited financial funds.
The following results are derived. The optimal subsidy policy is influenced by fund budget, service mode, service quality of providers and so on. Choosing appropriate subsidy scheme can alleviate the structural contradiction between supply and demand, and improve the performance of the government. More specifically, pure demand-side subsidy scheme can increase purchase rate of elderly service, but it cannot influence service quality of providers. Home-based, community and institutional providers are consistent in their quality choices and all serve at the lowest process quality. Therefore, pure demand-side subsidy is not conducive to the development of home-based elderly service provider with a high weighting of process quality. Pure supply-side subsidy scheme cannot directly influence the service purchase rate, but it can influence the quality choice of service providers, and the quality choice of home-based, community and institutional service providers are different. Thus, government can design different optimal subsidy policy for three service modes. However, there are funding thresholds for pure supply-side scheme, and financial subsidies beyond the threshold are ineffective, leading to a waste of financial resources. Two-sides subsidy scheme can simultaneously compensate for the shortcomings of demand-side subsidy, which cannot affect service quality, and supply-side subsidy, which wastes financial resources, but it also reduces the amount of subsidy on each side within limited financial resources. The numerical simulation results show that the supply side subsidy is the best subsidy scheme when the fund is insufficient and its impact on government performance objectives is much higher than that of demand-side subsidy, especially in the home-based elderly service mode. When financial funds are sufficient, adequate supply-side subsidy ensures that service provider serves at the highest quality standard, and the priority of subsidy needs to be shifted from the supply side to the demand side so as to create the demand-led growth. At this point, two-side subsidy scheme become the optimal solution. The effect gap between other subsidy scheme and optimal scheme keeps rising with the increase in financial resources. The above findings can be used as a reference for the government to formulate subsidy policy to promote the development of the elderly service industry. Subsidy policy should not be applied in a “one-size-fits-all” manner, but should be applied in different ways according to budget levels, service models and operating characteristics of service providers.

Key words: elderly services, effective supply, subsidy policies, dynamic game