Quantitative Study of Sichuan's Elderly Care Industry Policies from thePerspective of Policy Tools

With the increasing demand for elderly health services, Sichuan Province has successively introduced a number of policies to promote the development of local elderly care industry. In order to identify the gap between policy supply and industrial development demand, this paper constructs a three-dimensional policy analysis framework including model dimension, chain dimension and tool dimension, adopting content analysis and word cloud image analysis to conduct a quantitative analysis of the old-age industrial policy texts formulated in Sichuan Province from 2011 to 2023. The results show that supply-oriented policies dominate in Sichuan’s eldercare industry policies, indicating a lack of balance in the overall policy landscape. The policy direction for the development model of the eldercare industry is relatively ambiguous, and family eldercare security policies are insufficiently developed. Additionally, there is room for improvement in the systematic nature of policies targeting the eldercare industry chain. Based on these findings, the article puts forward corresponding countermeasures and suggestions: rational allocation of various types of policy tools; formulation of targeted policies for the development of the eldercare industry; and a well-conceived layout of the policy system.