Life expectancy in developed and developing countries has increased over the past several decades and continues to rise. As well as increasing life expectancy, birth rates have also decreased in many parts of the world, resulting in a demographic shift where the percentage of the population comprising people over 60 is growing rapidly. This has resulted in rising economic dependencies. A majority of the world’s older people in developing countries of Asia have no formal social security support such as pension schemes and health insurance. The elderly are also vulnerable because they are more likely to have health problems. When they are ill they often have insufficient cash to pay for medical services, and, in Asia, few have health insurance. For example, nowadays in Korean society, it would be hard for family members to look after the elderly and take care of them when they are sick. In advanced economies, governments have moved to take over this role in order to guarantee the welfare of the elderly. According to Jeremy Hunt, in South Korea, some older people live in clean and comfortable houses with their families, but many of them are in run-down apartments or worse in nursing homes, where their rights are abused. Even in Japan, the richest country in Asia, the rate of elderly living in poverty has tripled in a few years. The young generations are less keen than before to look after their parents, even though the middle-class today is richer than in generations past. The lack of income and health security for older people in developing economies is compounded by the fact that long-term care is not readily available and most of those requiring such support must rely on informal home care, or services provided by unpaid caregivers such as family members. In developed economies, where the cost of long-term care is very expensive, most Western European countries have put in place a mechanism to fund formal care, and in a number of Northern and Continental European countries, arrangements exist to at least partially fund informal care as well. East Asian societies should provide generous pensions and comprehensive universal healthcare coverage, but the health insurance is usually patchy – many catastrophic illnesses are not covered by national insurance systems – and pensions remain low or even non-existent. The challenges of providing long-term care services in developing countries are enormous and include financial, administrative, human resource and insurance issues. The gLAWcal Team Tuesday, April 15, 2014 (Source: HealthCareAsia) This news has been realized by gLAWcal—Global Law Initiatives for Sustainable Development in collaboration with the University Institute of European Studies (IUSE) in Turin, Italy and the University of Piemonte Orientale, Novara, Italy which are both beneficiaries of the European Union Research Executive Agency IRSES Project “Liberalism in Between Europe And China” (LIBEAC) coordinated by Aix-Marseille University (CEPERC). This work has been realized in the framework of Workpackages 4, coordinated by University Institute of European Studies (IUSE) in Turin, Italy.