Regional Differences in Socio-Economic Health Inequalities in Spain

This paper reports an analysis of income related health inequalities at the Autonomous Community level in Spain using the self assessed health measure in the 2001 edition of the Encuesta Nacional de Salud. We use recently developed methods in order to cardinalise and model self assessed health withi...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores: García Gómez, Pilar, López Nicolás, Ángel
Tipo de recurso: artículo
Fecha de publicación:2004
País:España
Institución:Universidad Politécnica de Cartagena(UPCT)
Repositorio:Repositorio Digital UPCT
OAI Identifier:oai:repositorio.upct.es:10317/1184
Acceso en línea:http://hdl.handle.net/10317/1184
Access Level:acceso abierto
Palabra clave:Desigualdades en salud
Análisis de descomposición
España
Health inequalities
Decomposition analysis
Spain
Economía Aplicada
Descripción
Sumario:This paper reports an analysis of income related health inequalities at the Autonomous Community level in Spain using the self assessed health measure in the 2001 edition of the Encuesta Nacional de Salud. We use recently developed methods in order to cardinalise and model self assessed health within a regression framework, decompose the sources of inequality and explain the observed differences across regions. We find that the regions with the highest levels of mean health tend to enjoy the lowest degrees of income related health inequality and vice-versa. The main feature characterizing regions where income related health inequality is low is the absence of a positive gradient between income and health. In turn, the regions where income related health inequality is greater are characterized by a strong and significant positive gradient between health and income. These results suggest that policies aimed at eliminating the gradient between health and income can potentially lead to greate r reductions in socio-economic health inequalities than policies aimed at redistributing income.