It is essential to develop an information system that feeds into care policies, guides the allocation of resources and makes it possible to include paid and unpaid care work in the system of national accounts. It grounded in the need to spread the risks and work towards higher-quality sendees. The rationale is analogous to the reasoning behind health insurance (Arrow, 1963 and 2000, Sojo, 2003): it is important to make sure that long-term care is guaranteed because fortuitous events can exacerbate dependence, and it is difficult to predict the degree of dependence that older persons will have to face, regardless of their socioeconomic status and any preventive measures or provisions for self-care they might have made during their lifetime in order to mitigate dependence. Child care, on the other hand, is a desired situation, not an unpredictable one, and bound up with a temporary need relating to this stage of development.