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. 2021 Jul 23:9:647670.
doi: 10.3389/fpubh.2021.647670. eCollection 2021.

Priorities and Instruments of Local Elderly Care Policies in China: Text Mining and Comparative Analysis

Xiuqi Li  1 , Aoyi Yang  2 , Han Yan  1
Affiliations

Priorities and Instruments of Local Elderly Care Policies in China: Text Mining and Comparative Analysis

Xiuqi Li et al. Front Public Health. .

Abstract

Health care for the elderly is one of the key issues in the field of public health. In the context of global aging, the government's policy framework for elderly care affects the development of local elderly care. The priorities and instruments of the elderly care policy are important windows for understanding the local development planning system. This paper uses a quantitative text analysis method based on text mining to analyze 3,618 provincial policies in China. Considering the pilot demonstration projects for elderly care selected by the Chinese government in recent years, this paper finds that local elderly care policies have a three-phase evolution, and the priorities in each phase are solving the legacy of transition, expanding private sector participation, and realizing the well-being of the elderly. Moreover, mature regions use more environmental policy instruments, and the most effective are financial services, regulatory systems, and strategic guidance. For immature regions, it is necessary to use more core instruments on the premise of using basic instruments so that public policies can serve local development and realize the well-being of the elderly.

Keywords: elderly care; policy instrument; policy priority; public health policy; text mining.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Analysis framework of China's local elderly care policy.
Figure 2
Figure 2
Descriptive statistics of policy corpus.
Figure 3
Figure 3
Annual number of the local elderly care policies promulgated in China, 2000–2020.
Figure 4
Figure 4
Keywords tag cloud of China's local elderly care policy based on TF-IDF.
Figure 5
Figure 5
Number of HEPDCs in China by province. Different background colors represent different numbers of projects. HEPDCs are Healthy Elderly care Pilot Demonstration Communities.
Figure 6
Figure 6
Proportion of instruments used in different regions in China.
Figure 7
Figure 7
The usage of elderly care policy instruments in mature and emerging regions in China. (A) Policy instruments with higher usage rates in emerging regions. (B) Policy instruments with higher usage rates in mature regions.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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