BACKGROUND: Studies have revealed large variations in average health status across social, economic, and other groups. No study exists on the distribution of the risk of ill-health across individuals, either within groups or across all people in a society, and as such a crucial piece of total health inequality has been overlooked. Some of the reason for this neglect has been that the risk of de...

Changes in rank-dependent income-related health inequality measures over time may usefully be decomposed into contributions due to changes in health outcomes and changes in individuals' positions in the income distribution. This paper establishes the normative implications of this type of decomposition by embedding it within a broader analysis of changes in the 'health achievement' index. We fu...

OBJECTIVES This study tested the hypothesis that disparities in political participation across socioeconomic status affect health. Specifically, the association of voting inequality at the state level with individual self-rated health was examined. METHODS A multilevel study of 279,066 respondents to the Current Population Survey (CPS) was conducted. State-level inequality in voting turnout b...

Evidence has been accumulated about the adverse effects of income inequality on individual health in industrial nations, but we know less about its effect in small-scale, pre-industrial rural societies. Income inequality should have modest effects on individual health. First, norms of sharing and reciprocity should reduce the adverse effects of income inequality on individual health. Second, wi...

BACKGROUND Although measuring socioeconomic inequality in population health indicators like infant mortality is important, more interesting for policy purposes is to try to explain infant mortality inequality. The objective of this paper is to quantify for the first time the determinants' contributions of socioeconomic inequality in infant mortality in Iran. METHODS A nationally representativ...

We use data from the 1985, 1987 and 1991 United States Vital Statistics Linked Infant Birth and Death Records to assess the effect of statelevel economic inequality on an infant’s probability of death. We find that economic inequality is associated with higher neonatal mortality even after we control mother’s age and race and state characteristics that are likely to be associated with both ineq...

OBJECTIVE To measure within-country wealth-related inequality in the health service coverage gap of maternal and child health indicators in sub-Saharan Africa and quantify its contribution to the national health service coverage gap. METHODS Coverage data for child and maternal health services in 28 sub-Saharan African countries were obtained from the 2000-2008 Demographic Health Survey. For ...

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES Most studies on health inequalities use average measures, but describing the distribution of health can also provide valuable knowledge. In this paper, we estimate and compare within-group and between-group inequalities in length of life for population groups in Ethiopia in 2000 and 2011. METHODS We used data from the 2011 and 2000 Ethiopia Demographic and Health Sur...

OBJECTIVE An imbalance in the distribution of economic resources, i.e., income inequality, is a characteristic of a community that may influence the aggregate health of the population. In North America, income inequality seems to be strongly related to mortality rates among American communities such as states and metropolitan areas but largely irrelevant for health at similar levels of geopolit...

An influential policy idea states that reducing inequality is beneficial for improving health in the low and middle income countries (LMICs). Our study provides an empirical test of this idea: we utilized data collected by the Demographic and Health Surveys between 2000 and 2011 in as much as 52 LMICs, and we examined the relationship between household wealth inequality and two health outcomes:...