Introduction

The literature analysing women's labour market participation and its implications for welfare polices has generally focused on childcare services, and more specifically, on the effects of this area of caregiving activities on female (namely, mother’s) employment. In particular, the development of public and publicly regulated care services for small children, on the one hand, enables women to participate in the labour market and, on the other, offers them employment opportunities.

With the ageing population and the changing forms of care, the developments in the elder care labour market are gradually becoming a crucial issue. In this respect, the ‘new risk’ of dependency represents a challenge and also an opportunity for the development of the welfare system.

This chapter provides an overview of the relationship between the development of long-term-care policies and services in European countries, and female employment in the care sector, by means of comparing statistical data, and spells out the specificities of Southern European countries, that is, the Mediterranean countries of Europe. We also aim at analysing the policy-making environments in which those policies are evolving in order to study the interaction between evolutions in the labour market for caring activities, immigration policies and the shape that those long-term care policies have been taking in Southern Europe, with a focus on Italy and Spain.

Whereas Northern European countries developed policies in this field at an earlier stage, and Continental countries have intervened with new policies in the last 10–20 years, in Southern Europe long-term care policies continue to be weak and fragmented. The Nordic countries have the highest degree of development in this domain, with a strong public involvement, both in the provision and the financing of care. The Bismarck-oriented countries of the Continental model have elaborated long-term care policies later on in time, at a smaller scale, and certainly with a weaker role being played by public administrations in the direct provision of services. In Southern European countries the creation of jobs in the sector is currently at a very low level, thus potentially representing a niche for labour force expansion.