Letter to the editor regarding Kawada's comments on the paper labour force participation and the influence of having CVD on income poverty of older workers

摘要

Tomoyuki Kawada [1] provided comments on our paper on labour force participation and the influence of having CVD on income poverty of older workers [2] published in April 2011 Kawada suggested using an alternate control group. In addition to the working status of the respondents, the 2003 Survey of Disability, Ageing and Carers (SDAC) also collected information on whether respondents were not in the labour force (NILF) due to their chronic condition or due to other reasons such as study, no need to work, etc. This allows us to specifically compare between those who were not in the labour force due to CVD and those NILF due to reasons other than a chronic condition. By selecting those NILF due to CVD as a control group, we could analyse if the respondents who were NILF due to CVD had a higher risk of being in income poverty than those NILF due to other reasons. As the results indicated, those NILF due to other reasons had significantly lower odds of being in income poverty than those NILF due to CVD, suggesting that it is not being out of the labour force alone that is associated with poverty. Had we selected full-time workers with no ill health as a control group, as suggested in Kawada's letter, we would not have been able to make a direct comparison between the two groups: those NILF due to CVD and those NILF due to other reasons.Kawada speculated that those with CVD who were out of the labour force probably suffered the severest forms of CVD. While we suspect that this is correct, the SDAC data used for this study did not include an indicator of severity.