Southern European countries share many common traits but there are differences among them that can justify different levels of need and of unmet need for social long-term care (LTC). In our study, we quantify met and unmet need for LTC for older people, in the four southern European countries – Portugal, Spain, Italy, and Greece – and we analyse their determinants, using multinomial logits and data from the sixth wave of the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE). We analyse the association between several demographic and socio-economic factors and the chances of having needs, and of receiving or not different types of care. Although most of the effects of the explanatory variables are valid in all the countries, some factors are more important in some countries than in others.

Portugal stands out as the country where people aged fifty or older have more care needs and, as a result, a higher risk of having people with unmet social care needs, compared to the other countries. Also, there is evidence that Portuguese women are especially penalized. In Greece and Portugal, people with the same characteristics have a higher probability of receiving exclusively informal care. Curiously, despite its suboptimal LTC system, the Greek reliance on informal care leads to superior performance in terms of unmet needs of people with ADL limitations. Italy and Spain show similar traits, particularly concerning the probabilities of having care needs and experiencing unmet needs. However, in Spain, receiving exclusively informal care is much less probable.

Our findings suggest caution in the treatment of southern European countries as a uniform cluster and the need to take the differences into consideration when defining a policy to promote disability-free ageing or to guarantee that support is provided when needed.

南欧国家有许多共同特征，但它们之间存在差异，可以证明对社会长期护理 (LTC) 的不同需求水平和未满足需求是合理的。在我们的研究中，我们量化了四个南欧国家——葡萄牙、西班牙、意大利和希腊——老年人对 LTC 的满足和未满足需求，并使用多项逻辑和来自第六轮调查的数据分析了它们的决定因素欧洲健康、老龄化和退休问题 (SHARE)。我们分析了几个人口和社会经济因素与有需求的机会以及接受或不接受不同类型护理的机会之间的关联。尽管解释变量的大部分影响在所有国家都有效，但有些因素在某些国家比在其他国家更重要。

与其他国家相比，葡萄牙是 50 岁或以上的人有更多护理需求的国家，因此，有更高的社会护理需求未得到满足的人的风险。此外，有证据表明葡萄牙女性尤其受到惩罚。在希腊和葡萄牙，具有相同特征的人更有可能接受专门的非正式护理。奇怪的是，尽管其 LTC 系统并不理想，但希腊对非正式护理的依赖导致在有 ADL 限制的人的未满足需求方面表现出色。意大利和西班牙表现出相似的特征，特别是在有护理需求和经历未满足需求的概率方面。然而，在西班牙，仅接受非正式护理的可能性要小得多。

我们的研究结果表明，在将南欧国家视为一个统一的集群时要谨慎，并且在制定促进无残疾老龄化的政策或保证在需要时提供支持时需要考虑到差异。