Demographic Change and the Living Arrangements of the Elderly: The Case of Brazil

Vitor F. Miranda, University of Pennsylvania

We use the case of Brazil to investigate how socioeconomic changes, on the one hand, and a decline in family sizes, on the other, may have independently influenced the prevalence of coresidence of elderly women with their adult children in that country from 1970 to 2009. We find that, despite the prevalence of processes which have been generally associated with a decline in intergenerational coresidence in the developing world, such as urbanization and expansion of old-age social security, levels of coresidence of elderly women with their offspring remained remarkably stable in Brazil until around 2000. In contrast with that, we find that the fast decline in fertility levels that started in the 1970s are projected to bring a decline in the levels of intergenerational coresidence in Brazil in the next twenty years that will happen at an unprecedented pace.