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years and more is growing the fastest, thus its share will increase meaningfully in the next 40 years, which will lead to a signi cant rise in the number of older people in need of care.
Care for elderly people in virtually all countries is provided by members of informal networks (mainly family members: spouses and children) (Kalwij, Pasini & Wu 2012; Ogg, & Renaut 2006). However, in some countries formal care services are better de- veloped in terms of the access to them and their provision than in others. For example, the public spending on LTC ranges between 0.1% of GDP in Greece, through 0.9% in Estonia to 3.5% in the Netherlands (OECD/Eu 2018), which is related to shares of older people receiving institutional long term care: 5.7% in Estonia and 18.4% in the Nether- lands (OCED 2017). Moreover, cultural contexts regarding responsibility for care for dependent people also have an impact on care arrangements for older people, which are also diversi ed geographically. As a result, there is a clear-cut division between Nordic and Western European countries, where family care is supported by and, in many cases, replaced by formal care services, while in Central, Eastern and Southern European countries care for the elderly relies mostly on family help (Haberkern & Szydlik 2010; Pfau-Ef nger 2005; Saraceno, Keck 2010; Albertini & Kohli 2013; Brandt et al. 2009).
Observed and anticipated changes in the family model may lead to a lack of potential family caregivers and, as a consequence, to a higher demand for formal care services.
A lack of informal and/ or formal care services or a limited access to them may be a source of the so-called unmet care needs among older adults, especially those with serious health problems (Abramowska-Kmon et al. 2019; Laferrère & Bosch 2015; Vlachantoni 2017; Vlachantoni et al. 2011). The extent of unmet care needs differs both among countries and among various social groups (by health status, nancial situation, family situation, etc.). Also, it is worth emphasising that unmet care needs may lower the quality of life and subjective well-being among older people (Landau & Litwin 2001; Tomini et al. 2016).
The aim of this paper was the analysis of the demand for care among people aged 65 years and more and its provision in selected European countries. The descriptive analy- ses for 17 European countries were based on the data from the 6th wave of the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE) collected in 2015 (Börsch-Supan 2017; Börsch-Supan et al. 2013).1 e nal sample accounted for more than 30 thous-
1 The data on informal and formal care in the 7th wave of SHARE was available for a limited number of countries (excluding Estonia), thus the results of analyses based on the 6th round are presented here.