The Socioeconomic Determinants of Health : Economic Growth and Health in the OECD Countries during the Last Three Decades
López-Casasnovas, Guillem (Universitat Pompeu Fabra. Departament d'Economia)
Soley Bori, Marina (Universitat Pompeu Fabra. Centre de Recerca en Economia i Salut (CRES))

Data:	2014
Resum:	In times of economic crisis, most countries face the dual challenge of fighting unemployment while restraining social expenditures and closing budget deficits. The spending cuts and lack of employment affect a large number of decisions that have a direct or indirect impact on health. This impact is likely to be unevenly distributed among different groups within the population, and therefore not only health levels may be at risk, but also their distribution. The main purpose of this paper is to explore links between unemployment, economic growth, inequality, and health. We regress a measure of health, the Health Human Development Index (HHDI), against a set of explanatory variables accounting for the countries' economic performance (GDP growth, unemployment, and income inequality), and some institutional factors related to welfare spending and the nature of the health systems for the past three decades. In addition, we explore the causes for different results obtained using an inequality-adjusted HHDI, vs. the unadjusted HHDI. We describe a panel data model, estimated by random effects, for 32 countries from 1980-2010, in five-year intervals. Our conclusion is that the high economic growth observed in the last decades, together with an increase in the levels of income inequality and/or poverty, explain the observed changes of our index, particularly when this indicator is weighted by health inequality. The remaining institutional variables (the share of social spending, health care expenditure, and the type of health systems) show the expected sign but are not statistically significant. A comment on the methodological pitfalls of the approach completes the analysis.
Drets:	Aquest document està subjecte a una llicència d'ús Creative Commons. Es permet la reproducció total o parcial, la distribució, la comunicació pública de l'obra i la creació d'obres derivades, fins i tot amb finalitats comercials, sempre i quan es reconegui l'autoria de l'obra original.
Llengua:	Anglès
Document:	Article ; recerca ; Versió publicada
Matèria:	Economic crisis ; Health inequality ; Health Distribution ; Income inequality ; Human Development Index ; Intergenerational welfare policies
Publicat a:	International journal of environmental research and public health, Vol. 11 Núm. 1 (January 2014) , p. 815-829, ISSN 1660-4601

DOI: 10.3390/ijerph110100815
PMID: 24406664

15 p, 201.9 KB

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