Inequalities in health : who you are? where you live? or who your parents were? / Adam Wagstaff, Heather Joshi, Pierella Paci.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Wagstaff, Adam, author.

Paci, Pierella, author.

Joshi, Heather, author.

Series:

Policy research working paper ; Volume 2713.

Policy research working paper ; Volume 2713

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Housing and health--Great Britain.

Housing and health.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (21 pages).

Other Title:

Causes of inequality in health

Policy research working paper vol. 2713

Place of Publication:

Washington, District of Columbia : World Bank, 2001.

Summary:

What explains inequality in health status among young adults in England and Wales? Inequalities in income and housing tenure play the biggest part. Data from the British National Child Development Study show that, among 33-year-olds, ill health (as measured by cardinalized responses to a question on self-assessed health) is concentrated among the worse off. Wagstaff, Paci, and Joshi seek to decompose the inequalities in health status into their socioeconomic causes. In this decomposition, inequalities in health status depend on inequalities in each of the underlying determinants of health and on the elasticities of health status with respect to each of these determinants. The authors estimate these elasticities using regression models that allow for unobserved heterogeneity at the community level. They find that inequalities in unobserved community-level influences account for only 6 percent of health inequality, and inequalities in parental education and social class for only 4 percent. Inequalities in income and housing tenure account for most health inequality, though inequalities in educational attainment and in math scores at age seven also play a part. This paper--a joint product of Public Services for Human Development, Development Research Group, and the Office of the Vice President, Human Development Network--is part of a larger effort in the Bank to investigate the links between poverty and Health. The authors may be contacted at awagstaff@worldbank.org, ppaci@worldbank.org, or hj@cls.ioe.ac.uk.

Notes:

Description based on publisher supplied metadata and other sources.

Publisher Number:

10.1596/1813-9450-2713