The Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center is pleased to announce that Kevin Y. Kim has been awarded the Shorenstein APARC Predoctoral Fellowship for 2009-2010.

The Fellowship supports a Stanford University predoctoral student’s research within a broad range of topics related to the political economy of contemporary East Asia. Fellows whose main focus is Japan are called Takahashi Fellows, in honor of the Takahashi family, whose generous gift has made this fellowship possible. Fellows studying other regions are called Shorenstein APARC Fellows

Kevin Kim is a Ph.D. candidate in history at Stanford University. He specializes in 20th century U.S. foreign relations, with an emphasis on U.S.-Asia relations. He currently is completing a dissertation titled, “Forging the Free World: Korea, U.S. Leaders, and the World, 1948-1954.” This study examines the impact of the Korean War upon the evolution of U.S. national leaders’ foreign policy ideas on strategy, economy, race, and world politics. Influenced by “constructivist” approaches and traditional historical methods, his dissertation explores the Korean War period as a formative moment in the construction of contemporary U.S. liberal and conservative foreign policy beliefs.

Before entering graduate school, Kim was a Fulbright fellow in South Korea from 2001 to 2002, where he taught English in a Daejeon public middle school and studied Korean language and U.S.-Asia relations at various institutions. He also briefly pursued a career in journalism, and has written on culture, domestic politics, and international affairs for publications such as The Nation, The Progressive, Far Eastern Economic Review, South China Morning Post, and The Village Voice.

Kim received his M.A. in history from Stanford University and a B.A. in English and Comparative Literature from Columbia University. He was born and raised in the New York City metropolitan area.

East and Southeast Asia are aging rapidly. South Korea, for example, has become one of the fastest aging societies in the world. In France, 115 years (1865–1980) were required for the proportion of population aged 65 and over to rise from 7 percent to 14 percent, but in South Korea, it is expected that a comparable change will occur in only eighteen years (2000–2018). More strikingly, it will take only eight years (2018–2026) for the proportion of South Korea’s elderly to increase from 14 percent to 20 percent. The nation’s old-age dependency ratio grew from 5.7 percent in 1970 to 12.6 percent in 2005, and is projected to further increase to 72.0 percent by 2050. At the macroeconomic level, these figures suggest an increasing burden on the working-age population to support the elderly population.

Such figures, however, do not tell the whole story about the burden shouldered by the working-age population. The lives of elderly and working-age individuals are not separate but rather, are linked by the institution of the family. Working-age adult children often take on the role of caring for elderly parents, who may have functional limitations and cognitive impairments. Such informal family caregiving is embedded in traditional Korean culture, as it is in many Asian societies that uphold traditional norms of filial piety.

As the elderly population grows, the demand for elderly long-term care will increase sharply. The supply of informal care, however, is decreasing for a number of reasons. Declining fertility rates have already diminished the potential pool of family caregivers. Further reducing the availability of family caregivers is an array of socioeconomic changes, such as increased migration, decreasing rates of intergenerational co-residence, and increasing labor force participation rates among women, who have historically served as the main family caregivers. Adult children, therefore, will increasingly experience a conflict between parental care responsibilities and their own work. Anecdotal evidence suggests that many daughters or daughters-in-law give up their professional employment to care for their disabled parent(s) or parent(s)-in-law. The work-family conflict also has important implications for the economy—informal caregiving may have additional negative effects on the labor force participation of the already shrinking working-age population.

I recently conducted a study using data from the Korean Longitudinal Study of Aging. My study indicated that providing at least ten hours of care per week reduces the probability of female labor force participation by 15.2 percentage points. I concluded that informal care is already an important economic issue in South Korea even though its population aging is still at an early stage. If the current trend continues, the labor market costs of informal caregiving will increase as the country experiences the full force of the demographic transition. One of the expected benefits of the public long-term care insurance implemented in July 2008 is to help family caregivers participate more easily in the labor force. In Japan, there is some evidence that long-term care insurance positively affects female labor force participation, but such beneficial effects have not yet materialized clearly in Korea. In both countries, there is much to learn from early experience with long-term care insurance.

In most parts of Asia, informal caregivers remain invisible on the policy agenda, not only because of cultural norms that perpetuate family-centered care but also because informal care incurs no public cost. However, the demographic transition, coupled with socioeconomic changes in the region, underscores the need to examine whether informal care is really without costs, at both individual and societal levels. Throughout Asia, the challenge for public policy will be finding the optimal mix of informal, family-based and formal, socially supported elder care.