Envelhecimento e cuidado: quais os efeitos da mudança populacional para a produção e o consumo do trabalho de cuidado não remunerado no Brasil?

Abstract

Care work is understood as the actions carried out in order to meet the basic needs related to life and household maintenance. In this way, it is understood that all people are consumers of care work, but the responsibility for producing these activities has historically fallen to women. Understanding that the task also expresses an interdependence between generations, it is expected that this will be impacted by the demographic transition process, which promotes population growth and a transformation of the age structure, with a reduction in the proportional participation of children and an increase in the participation of the elderly. The aim of this study is to measure the effects of different demographic regimes on the production and consumption of unpaid care work for the total Brazilian population in 2015. The study makes use of estimates made by Jesus (in press), based on the PNAD (2015), of the unpaid production and consumption time that men and women dedicated to domestic chores and care. In order to capture the effect of population change, the study applied the number of people by age and sex, as well as the age structures of the Brazilian population of 1970 (young), 2022 (adult) and that projected by the IBGE for 2060 (elderly) to the 2015 context, using the direct standardization technique. This exercise revealed the following effects: i) population growth and aging cause consumption to exceed production, both concentrated in older age groups; ii) production peaks are related to the age patterns of motherhood and marriage, which vary according to the change in the age structure; iii) in monetary terms, if this practice were paid for and had its production included in the calculation of national accounts, in a population of the same size as in 2015, with only the age structure varying, the 2015 GDP would be increased by 7.6% in the young age bracket and 10.4% in the adult and elderly age brackets. Although consumption increases with ageing, the proportional decrease in adults has an impact on production, demonstrating the urgency of rethinking the social structure that maintains this conjecture, based on initiatives that promote equity and the sustainability of care.