Impact of Expansions of the Personal Assistance Service for the Disabled on Unmet Care in South Korea

Abstract

While the Korean government allocates approximately 60% of the total budget for the disabled to the Personal Assistance Service, there has been no systematic analysis on the effectiveness of the program. Applying a difference-in-differences methodology to a repeated cross-sectional survey data, we find that eligibility expansions from 2011 to 2015 of the Personal Assistance Service had no significant effect on reducing the unmet needs for personal assistance. Access to the service, however, reduced the amount of care given by family and friends, implying that there may have been a close-to-perfect crowd-out.