Informal care is today the form of support most commonly used in Spain by those who need help in order to carry out basic daily activities. The potential labour opportunity costs incurred by Spanish informal carers have not as yet been quantified. In this paper we use the Spanish subsample of the European Community Household Panel (1994)(1995)(1996)(1997)(1998)(1999)(2000)(2001) to estimate an econometric model which we exploit to examine the effects of various types of informal care on labour market outcomes. Our results reveal the existence of non-negligible costs in terms of foregone employment for carers who live with the dependent person and/or provide more than 28 h of care/week. We also find that providing care for more than a year has negative effects on employment. Nonetheless, there seems to be no contemporaneous employment effects associated to either starting or ending an episode of care.

To date, both in Spain and virtually all the other European Union (EU) countries, dependency has been seen to be a fundamentally private problem to be dealt with by the family concerned. In this way, whether through informal carers or contracted professionals, in the domestic environment or in care homes, it is the dependent person themselves and their families who currently bear the majority of the costs. In light of this, current concern lies in the social change that is coming on, mainly the accelerated aging process and the increased participation of middle-aged women in the labour market, which heighten the need for collective organisation of that which until now has been resolved within family circles. In this context, at the same time that the Government announces to issue a <> by the end of 2005, our paper briefly analyzes what we consider the four crucial issues in this area: the current scope of dependency problems and its possible future evolution, the characteristics of the current spanish long-term care system and its main problems; the role that health services should have in the dependency issue; and finally, the benefits and drawbacks of the main alternatives that the Administration could manage in case it intends to increase its involvement in this field.