Rising proportions of elderly persons in developing countries are coinciding with slow progress in addressing poor levels of nutrition, schooling and health amongst young people. In both public and private domains, critical investments in children increasingly compete with the need to support elderly parents. Within this context, the objective of this study is to advance understanding of the role played by public policy, private resources, preferences, exogenous shocks and markets - and the interactions amongst these factors - in the allocation of resources across three generations in Guatemala. The setting is four villages in the Orient (Eastern) region and the localities to where people from these communities migrated. A unique feature of our interdisciplinary study - our research team draws anthropology, demography, economics, epidemiology, nutrition, and psychology - is that it builds upon more than 30 years of data collection and interaction with these communities. Together with survey work undertaken as part of this study, we will have data on the allocation of resources across three generations: elderly parents, their children who are now themselves middle-aged parents and their grandchildren. Ours will be the first study to link prospectively collected data on investments in children's human capital with subsequent transfers and investments between these individuals and both their aging parents and with their own offspring. Middle-aged parents face a trade-off in the allocation of time to work, to elder and child care, and to leisure and in the allocation of income to their own consumption, to meeting the consumption needs of their elderly parents, and investments in the human capital of their children. Accordingly, analysis focuses on how this allocation problem is conditioned by factors such as: altruism; resources available to elderly parents and their middle-aged children; access to markets for capital and for services; shocks - including health shocks - experienced by all three generations; attitudes towards inequality in outcomes amongst children and the extent of their replication across generations. We adopt a broad view of these allocations, considering transfers of money, goods, care and attention and co-residence. We consider how these interactions are gender-differentiated and how siblings resolve the collective action problem associated with caring for elderly parents. We also analyze the consequences of these interactions for the well-being of the elderly and the young. Well-being is broadly defined to include for the elderly: physical and mental health, access to preventive/curative health care as well satisfaction with health status, social resources, and economic resources. For the young, we consider health status, nutrition, schooling progress and cognitive development.
