pdf [5.3MB] - Department of Families, Housing, Community Services

2.3.2.2 INFORMAL CARER PRODUCTIVITY LOSSESCarers are people who provide informal care to others in need of assistance or support. Forexample, carers may take time off work to accompany people with an illness to medicalappointments, stay with them in hospital, or care for them at home. Carers may also taketime off work to undertake many of the unpaid work the person with the illness used to do –such as provide childcare, do the housework, yard work, shopping and so on.Informal care is distinguished from services provided by people employed in thehealth and community sectors (formal care) because the care is generally providedfree of charge to the recipient and is not regulated by the government. Most informalcarers are family or friends of the person receiving care.While informal care is provided free of charge, it is not free in an economic sense, as timespent caring is time that cannot be directed to other activities such as paid work, unpaid work(such as housework or yard work) or leisure. As such, informal care is a use of economicresources.There are three potential methodologies that can be used to place a dollar value on the levelof informal care:opportunity cost method – measures the formal sector productivity losses associatedwith caring, as time devoted to caring responsibilities is time which cannot be spent inthe paid workforce;self-valuation method – measures that carers themselves feel they should be paid;andreplacement cost method – measures the cost of ‘buying’ an equivalent amount ofcare from the formal sector, if the informal care were not supplied.The self-valuation method is not commonly used, and there are few reliable Australianstudies of the amount Australian carers feel they should be compensated.Estimates of the value of informal care are very sensitive to the estimation methodologyused. In general, the opportunity cost method is used as data about the age and sex of thecarers are available from SDAC and the aim of this report would be to estimate the currentimpacts on people with a resulting health outcome (from NFF) and their families, rather thana ‘what if’ scenario if this care were instead provided by formal care providers.2.3.3 CRIMINAL JUSTICE SYSTEM COSTSGreater rates of participation in crime and delinquency due to NFF lead to greaterexpenditures within the criminal justice system. Criminal justice system expenditures wouldutilise a top-down approach for cost estimation. Total governments expenditures for thejustice system are provided in the report for government services, produced by the SteeringCommittee for the Review of Government Service Provision (SCRGSP). Expenditures arereported by police services, court administration and corrective services.These government expenditures encapsulate total recurrent costs for both federal as well asstate and territory programs. To attribute these expenditures to the impacts of NFF, theserecurrent costs need to be converted to per case expenditures, that is, divided by the totalnumber of people accessing these services. For example, the ABS produces statistics oncourt appearances (Cat. no. 4513.0), which can be used to derive an average cost perappearance. Evidence from the literature showing the causal effects of a NFF environment44