Obstacle Factors and Spatial Measurement of the Well-Being of the Elderly in China

Abstract

This paper takes 31 provinces in China as the research object and constructs an evaluation index system for the well-being of the elderly in four aspects (health well-being, income well-being, social well-being and educational well-being) and uses a set-pair analysis model to spatially measure the well-being of the elderly. Then, barrier analysis is used to identify the main factors that lead to the differences in the well-being levels of the elderly in different regions. The results show that: (1) The provinces with higher levels of well-being of the elderly are mainly concentrated in the Beijing–Tianjin–Hebei region, Pearl River Delta region, Yangtze River Delta region and Bohai Sea Rim region. (2) The differences in income well-being levels are the largest among provinces, and the differences in health levels are the smallest among provinces. (3) Analysis of the barriers to elderly well-being shows that the number of beds per 1000 population in health care facilities, elderly dependency ratio, number of higher education schools for adults, number of nursing homes and urban road area per capita are the main factors affecting the differences in the well-being levels of elderly people across provinces. Finally, policy recommendations are made to introduce localized policies for the elderly in China to continuously promote solutions to the problems of the elderly.