Poverty and the Impact of AIDS on Older-Age Parents: Evidence from Cambodia and Thailand

John Knodel, University of Michigan

This paper examines the impact of the AIDS epidemic on the material and social well-being of the parents of adults who die of AIDS in Cambodia and Thailand. The focus is on how this impact interacts with poverty, primarily at the household level but also in association with societal levels of poverty. The analysis examines how poverty conditions the routes through which adult child loss impacts parents, including caregiving during illness, paying for medical and living expenses, opportunity costs, funeral expenses, loss of filial support, and fostering orphaned grandchildren. In addition, the interaction between the poverty status of parents and community reaction is explored. Thai data come from individual case information provided by key informants and survey interviews with AIDS and non-AIDS parents. Cambodian data come from a population based survey of older persons and a purposive sample of older persons who experienced an adult child death.