Interrelated Dynamics of Health and Poverty in Australia

Using the Households, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) survey, this study examines the joint dynamics of health and poverty of Australian families. Taking advantage of panel data, the modelling approach used in this study allows a better estimation of the causal relation between health and poverty. The results indicate that the causality runs both ways and the relationship could be confounded by unobserved heterogeneity. In particular, it is found that families headed by a person in ill-health are more likely to be in poverty compared with families headed by a person with good health. On the other hand, a family head whose family is in poverty in the current year is more likely to be in ill-health in the next year compared with a family head whose family is not in poverty. In addition, there is evidence that health and poverty are affected by correlated unobserved determinants, causing health to be endogenous to poverty. Consequently, treating health as exogenous in a poverty equation would produce a biased estimate for its effect.