Introduction

The Gateway Policy Explorer continues to expand its offerings, providing more detailed policy research on historical education, long-term care, and retirement policies across the United States and around the world.

This blog post provides an overview of the recent additions to the Gateway Policy Explorer and gives a preview of what policy information will be available later this year. 

Education

The Education Policy Series continues to expand, documenting compulsory education and educational tracking policies in the United States and in other countries for periods when HRS-INS respondents and their children would have been affected.

The latest expansion in the Education Policy Series includes documentation of state-level differences in compulsory schooling policies across the United States from 1900 to the present. The current version, released in March, provides compulsory schooling policy information for 40 U.S states. Additionally, with the policy comparison tool described above, users can now compare specific policies, such as minimum school leaving age, across states and time. An example of such a comparison is shown below.

The International Compulsory Schooling Policy Subseries also continues to grow. Since the initial release, the Gateway has added international compulsory schooling policy data for Luxembourg, Estonia, Portugal, and Sweden – bringing the total number of countries available for comparison and download to 25.

Going forward, the Education Policy Series will broaden its collection of compulsory schooling policies to encompass all U.S. states, Puerto Rico, and the District of Columbia this summer, as well as all states in India by early next year. It will also expand its international coverage to include compulsory policies for over 40 countries. Additionally, a new subseries on cross-country differences in educational tracking policies is being reviewed by country-specific experts and is forthcoming by the end of the summer 2025.

Data collection and documentation efforts will further expand to include policies that affect disparities in schooling access and quality, as well as early childhood education policies. With this information, the Gateway hopes to enhance and promote cross-national and longitudinal studies on aging, particularly those focusing on early-life factors contributing to Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias.

Long-Term Care

The Long-Term Care (LTC) Policy Series has also expanded considerably since our last update. New policy documents across all the LTC policies – cash benefits, in-kind benefits, 24-hour care, and service vouchers – have been published, bringing our coverage to 16 countries and 25 U.S. states, with a total of 53 documents published across all LTC policies.

Additionally, the LTC team will soon be releasing harmonized eligibility measures for LTC, based on care needs and means. LTC systems across the world vary in how they determine eligibility for care, with most requiring the applicant to meet a specific care needs threshold. The Gateway team used each country’s or state’s assessment criteria, gathered through their detailed policy collection, and corresponding HRS-INS questions to create measures of need-based eligibility for services.

In some countries, and particularly seen across the United States, eligibility for many programs also requires individuals to have resources below a set limit (i.e., a means test), that is typically very low. LTC systems typically use a care needs assessment tool to understand an applicant's current medical condition, and whether they meet the care needs eligibility criteria.

Estimating eligibility for LTC benefits and programs is particularly challenging due to the complex nature of care needs assessments and eligibility criteria. For example, the table below shows the presence of sub-activities for physical hygiene across various states and countries’ care need assessments; while many states and countries assess similar items (e.g., activities of daily living (ADLs) and cognitive status), there is significant variation in the level of specificity and detail for each item.

The resulting programs and measures can be used to assess differences in eligibility across countries and time, based on alternative assessment designs. By creating these harmonized eligibility measures, the Gateway aims to facilitate research into key questions, such as whether these LTC programs are reaching their target populations, where gaps in access to care exist, and how eligibility rates vary across countries and states over time. These harmonized measures, along with programs and documentation, are expected to be released on the Gateway website this summer.

Retirement

Over the past six months, the Retirement Policy Series has enhanced its coverage of old-age retirement policies, offering more detailed information on programs that impact individuals aged 50 and older, including old-age benefits, social assistance, and health insurance.

The newest retirement policy information added to the Gateway outlines eligibility requirements and benefit calculations from 1992 to the present for both Mexico and India. For both Mexico and India, the historical policy information covers old-age benefits, surviving spouse old-age benefits, and old-age social assistance benefits, and includes old-age health insurance benefits for Mexico. With the addition of retirement policy data on these two countries, the Gateway Policy Explorer now provides old-age retirement policy information on 17 countries.

In the coming months, we plan to publish documents with detailed policy information on old-age retirement policies in Slovenia and Slovakia, increasing the coverage to 19 countries.

As the Retirement Policy Series continues to grow, a helpful feature in the Policy Explorer enables users to choose a policy area, country, policy component, and year, providing a streamlined way to access detailed, time-specific policy data for individual countries. This tool can also be used to compare policies across multiple countries, as shown below for eligibility criteria for old-age social assistance programs in 2024 for India and Mexico.

The Gateway team will continue to build on this momentum, expanding historical policy collection across Education, LTC, and Retirement, with the hopes that this data will enable robust research on a variety of topics.