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Heterogeneous Influence of Socioeconomic Inequality on Population Health: A Cross-national Study

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Abstract

Prior studies have documented the negative impact of socioeconomic inequality on population health, but few studies have discussed the heterogeneous health effects of socioeconomic inequality. This study proposes using a quantile regression model to examine the heterogeneous influence of socioeconomic inequality (educational inequality, income inequality, and unemployment rate) on population health (life expectancy and healthy life expectancy) based on macro panel data from 160 countries. It was found that in both rich and poor countries, elevated income inequality and unemployment rate significantly predicted reduced life expectancy and healthy life expectancy, while the influences of educational inequality on the two health outcomes were not significant. Furthermore, the negative influence of socioeconomic inequality on population health was mainly observed in countries with lower-level population health. Robust results supported the above findings when lagged population health outcomes were used. Therefore, nations with poor population health should pay more attention to socioeconomic inequality, and state regulations should be actively used to promote equality in income, education and employment for health promotion.

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Notes

  1. The outcome variables, including life expectancy and healthy life expectancy, were obtained from the official website of the WHO (WHO, 2022). Other variables were obtained from the official website of the UNDP (UNDP, 2022a).

  2. Life expectancy and healthy life expectancy are not related to age structure of the population in terms of operationalization (Souza & Rêgo, 2018), so age structure index was not used as a control variable in the analysis.

  3. The average GDP per capita of three periods was not used as the cut-off point, because this strategy would make the number of developed countries very small, which might make the standard error larger and mislead us about the significance of estimations.

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  1. School of Sociology, Central China Normal University, No.152 Luoyu Road, Wuhan, 430079, China

    Junfeng Jiang

  2. Hubei Research Center of Social Development and Social Policy, Central China Normal University, No.152 Luoyu Road, Wuhan, 430079, China

    Junfeng Jiang

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Jiang, J. Heterogeneous Influence of Socioeconomic Inequality on Population Health: A Cross-national Study. Soc Indic Res 169, 1109–1124 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11205-023-03204-8

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