Health inequalities by education, income and wealth: a comparison of 11 European countries and the US

Abstract

I compare education-, income- and wealth-related health inequality using data from 11 European countries and the US. The health distributions in the US, England and France are relatively unequal independent of the stratifying variable, while Switzerland or Austria always have relatively equal distributions. Some countries such as Italy dramatically change ranks depending on the stratifying variable.

Acknowledgements

This article uses data from the early release 1 of SHARE 2004. This release is preliminary and may contain errors that will be corrected in later releases. The SHARE data collection has been primarily funded by the European Commission through the 5th framework programme (project QLK6-CT-2001-00360 in the thematic programme Quality of Life). Additional funding came from the US National Institute on Ageing (U01 AG09740-13S2, P01 AG005842, P01 AG08291, P30 AG12815, Y1-AG-4553-01 and OGHA 04-064). Data collection in Austria (through the Austrian Science Fund, FWF), Belgium (through the Belgian Science Policy Office) and Switzerland (through BBW/OFES/UFES) was nationally funded.

Notes

¹ The method to compute I* is based on the decomposition formula suggested in Wagstaff et al. (2003).

² I use the 2002 wave extracted from the RAND HRS data file, which was developed at RAND with funding from the National Institute on Ageing and the Social Security Administration. HRS, ELSA and SHARE are described by Juster and Suzman (1995), Marmot et al. (2003) and Börsch-Supan et al. (2005), respectively. The youngest sampled HRS cohort in 2002 was born in 1947; individuals younger than 55 were thus excluded from the ELSA and SHARE samples, too.