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Jerome Adda and Tarani Chandola, University College London
(Project no. 30011)
The effect of income inequality on health has been the subject of academic debate in recent years. Differences in health and mortality between countries and between regions within countries have been attributed to differences between these areas in terms of income inequality. It has been hypothesised that the relative difference in income between members of a region or country has an effect on their health, over and above the effect of absolute levels of income on health.
However, there have been relatively little analyses of longitudinal studies on the effect of aggregate levels of income inequality on individual health outcomes such as mortality. By disentangling age and period effects, such analyses could examine whether
1. there is an effect of income inequality on mortality controlling for individual measures of income
2. this effect changes in periods of increasing or decreasing income inequality
Preliminary analyses of longitudinal data from Sweden suggests that, contrary to theoretical expectations, the hazard of dying is lower in periods of higher income inequality. It is important to see whether such patterns are replicated in England and Wales.
Individual and regional level data from the LS will be merged with a time series of regional income inequality data from the Family Expenditure Survey (the gini coefficients as calculated by the Institute of Fiscal Studies) to examine the effects of income inequality on mortality. These separate data files will be merged by distributing the regional gini coefficients (from the FES) to individuals in the LS based on their standard region of residence in 1971 and 1981.
We propose to analyse mortality differentials from 1971 onwards, taking account of individual level characteristics in the LS with an additional ecological indicator of income inequality in the region of residence. This will be obtained from the FES and added at an aggregated level at our own site.