Inequality of opportunities in health in France: a first pass (original) (raw)
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We may consider the role of social and familial determinism among the range of causes of inequality of opportunity in health. Health status in adulthood is affected by an individual's social background. two hypotheses are proposed in the literature: the direct effect of living conditions during childhood on adult health; the indirect effect of the family background on the future
International journal for equity in health, 2015
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 stratification produce the same health gradient and to which extent health gradients of income and of social origins vary with level of living and income inequality. A total of 299,770 observations were available from 18 countries assessed in EU-SILC 2005 and 2011 data, which contain information on social origins. Income inequality (Gini) and level of living were calculated from EU-SILC. Logit rank transformation provided normalized inequalities and distributions of income and social origins up to the extremes of the distribution and was used to investigate net comparable health gradients in detail. Multileve...
Multigenerational Inequalities of Opportunity in Health Outcomes
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Our paper investigates the relationship between family income and child health in France. We first examine whether there is a significant correlation between family income and child general health, and the evolution of this relationship across childhood years. We then study the role of specific health problems, access to health care, and supplemental health insurance coverage, in the income gradient in general health. We also quantify the role of income in child anthropometric measurements. Whenever possible, we compare our results for France with those obtained for other developed countries. Using data on up to approximately 24,000 French children from the Health, Health Care and Insurance Surveys, we apply econometric techniques to quantify the correlation between household income, child general health, specific health problems, anthropometric characteristics, access to health care, and supplemental insurance coverage. There is a positive and significant correlation between family...
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Cumulating evidence from social science has indicated the intergenerational transmission of inequality is majorly derived from the economic imbalance. In line with this, the same thing happens in health, and emerging evidence has been documenting its transmissible property. No matter the genetic or non-genetic causes, health inequality inevitably plays its role in contributing to the underlying health-associated despoliation in life. Each individual shows an eventual health state where equality and inequality reach a time-dependent temporary condition in which the balancing point fluctuates back and forth. To promote the overall health status, it is crucial to promote and optimize the positive health characteristics to get equilibrium between positive and negative. This review discussed the underlying mechanisms of intergenerational transmission of health inequality by focusing on different types of contributors to the inequality and providing prospective insights into the potentially beneficial strategies that can optimize overall individual health.
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2007
It is well known that health and socio-economic status (SES) are linked through a bi-directional relationship. In addition, such a relationship takes place early in life and keeps on evolving over time so that both one's health and SES at a given point in time result from the cumulative effects of this spiral. Thus, only by simultaneously accounting for both pathways as well as for their dynamics would one be able to provide a clear picture of both the process of health accumulation and the dynamics of SES formation. We estimate a structural model where a variety of causal paths between different health dimensions and SES measures as well as their dynamics are simultaneously accounted for. This allows distinction between significant causal paths and insignificant ones, while accounting for endogeneity as well as for cofounders. We use the SOCIOLD survey where the targeted population is that of the older workforce (50 and older) from six EU countries (Denmark, Finland, France, Greece, the Netherlands and the UK). Our results show that (i) reverse causality is indeed a crucial issue: one's previous socio-economic status influences current health and previous health influences current socioeconomic status, (ii) there are cumulative effects in the sense that both health and socio-economic statuses depend on their past values and (iii) the results are sensitive to whether simultaneity is explicitly accounted for or not.
The objective of this paper is to characterize the evolution of income-related health inequalities (IRHI) in France between 1998 and 2002, computing concentration indexes and decomposing them in explanatory factors. Two complementary approaches are offered here. The first follows other European IRHI analyses, where self-assessed health is re-scaled and made continuous, using the 1994 Canadian HUI distribution. The second uses an indicator which has been constructed specifically for this study and which is based on additional health data from the same source as the SAH measure. This global health indicator (GHI) uses, beyond SAH, a set of semi-continuous variables measuring the number of diseases at individual level together with the minimal vital risk and the disability that they generate. Changes induced in income-related health inequalities over time will be analysed using both indicators. The data comes from the 1998 and 2002 IRDES Health and Health Insurance Survey (HHIS) and is...
Health and Income Inequalities in Europe: What Is the Role of Circumstances
Equality of opportunity theories distinguish between inequalities due to individual effort and those due to external circumstances. Recent research has shown that half of the variability in income of World population was determined by country of birth and income distribution. Since health and income are generally strictly related, the aim of this paper is to estimate how much variability in income and health is determined by external circumstances. We use data from the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement (SHARE) and the English Longitudinal Survey on Ageing (ELSA), two comparable multidisciplinary surveys that provide micro-level data on health and financial resources among the elderly for a large number of European countries. Our baseline estimation shows that about 20% of the variability in income is explained by current country-specific circumstances, while health outcomes range from 12% using BMI to 19% using self-rated health. By including early-life circumstances, the explained variability increases almost 20 percentage points for income and for self-rated health but less for other health outcomes. Finally, by controlling for endogeneity issues linked with effort, our estimates indicate that circumstances better explain variability in health outcomes. Results are robust to some tests, and the implications of these findings are discussed. © 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.