BACKGROUND Notions of equity are fundamental to, and drive much of the current thinking about global health. Health inequity, however, is usually measured using health inequality as a proxy - implicitly conflating equity and equality. Unfortunately measures of global health inequality do not take account of the health inequity associated with the additional, and unfair, encumbrances that poor h...

The relationship between poverty and mental health is indisputable. However, to have an influence on the next set of sustainable global development goals, we need to understand the causal relationships between social determinants such as poverty, inequality, lack of education and unemployment; thereby clarifying which aspects of poverty are the key drivers of mental illness. Some of the major c...

The relative income hypothesis interprets statistical associations between income inequality and average health status at the population level, as evidence that income inequality has a deleterious psychosocial effect on individual health. An alternative explanation is that these, population-level associations, are statistical artefacts of curvilinear, individual-level relationships between inco...

BACKGROUND Health inequalities reflect multidimensional inequality (income, education, and other indicators of socioeconomic position) and vary across countries and welfare regimes. To which extent there is intergenerational transmission of health via parental socioeconomic status has rarely been investigated in comparative perspective. The study sought to explore if different measures of strat...

In this paper we conduct a multilevel analysis to examine how regional income inequality affects self-rated health in Japan based on two nationwide surveys. We confirm that prefecture-level income inequality significantly affects self-assessments of health by individuals, even after controlling for a broad set of both individual and regional variables. We also find that health assessment is mor...

STUDY OBJECTIVE To investigate whether the income distribution in a Russian region has a "contextual" effect on individuals' self rated health, and whether the regional income distributions are related to regional health differences. METHODS The Russia longitudinal monitoring survey (RLMS) is a survey (n = 7696) that is representative of the Russian population. With multilevel regressions bot...

The dependence of health and physical fitness on the socio-economic factors of rural families in southern Ethiopia is investigated, with particular emphasis on the role of inequality. This paper contributes to our knowledge of the effect of inequality on health in several ways: it compares the results of objective and subjective health measures, it distinguishes between wealth inequality and nu...