Informal care is crucial for long-term care. Excluding informal care from economic evaluations involves the danger of shifting cost towards the social network of care recipients. Various methods have been proposed and applied to value informal care in economic evaluations. They include subjective burden scales (Drummond, 1991), monetary valuation methods, see Van den Berg et al. (2004) for an overview, and well-being scales (Van den Berg and Ferrer-i-Carbonell (2007).

This session will compare various valuation methods using new empirical evidence from Asia and Europe.

The first paper reports on the first study in Japan using a subjective burden scale that encompasses both negative and positive aspects involved in providing informal care. Our second paper reports the results of the first study in Thailand valuing informal care in monetary terms using and comparing both the opportunity and proxy good methods. The final paper presents the first empirical results ever of a comparison of convergent validity of monetary and non-monetary valuation methods applied in one sample of informal caregivers.

Together the three papers demonstrate the considerable impact providing informal care may have on people and how this impact can be valued in non-monetary and monetary terms of money for use in economic evaluations.