IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/rtv/ceisrp/146.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Income Distribution, Infant Mortality, and Health Care Expenditure

Author

Abstract

Do health outcomes depend on relative income as well as on an individual?s absolute level of income? We use infant mortality as a health status indicator and ?nd a signi?cant and positive link between infant mortality and income inequality using cross-national data for 98 countries. Holding constant the income of each of the three poorest quintiles of a country's population, we ?nd that an increase in the income of the upper 20% of the income distribution is associated with higher, not lower infant mortality. Our results imply that a one percentage point decrease in the income share of the richest quintile correlates with a decrease in infant mortality by nearly two percent. The surprisingly positive coe¢cient becomes insignificant when we control for public health care expenditure. Low public expenditure on health care seems to translate into limited access to health care for the poor.

Suggested Citation

  • Tilman Tacke & Robert J. Waldmann, 2009. "Income Distribution, Infant Mortality, and Health Care Expenditure," CEIS Research Paper 146, Tor Vergata University, CEIS, revised 30 Sep 2009.
    • Handle: RePEc:rtv:ceisrp:146
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://ceistorvergata.it/RePEc/rpaper/RP146.pdf
    File Function: Main text
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Angus Deaton, 2003. "Health, Inequality, and Economic Development," Journal of Economic Literature, American Economic Association, vol. 41(1), pages 113-158, March.
    2. Robert H. Frank, 2005. "Positional Externalities Cause Large and Preventable Welfare Losses," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 95(2), pages 137-141, May.
    3. Robert J. Waldmann, 1992. "Income Distribution and Infant Mortality," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 107(4), pages 1283-1302.
    4. Bruno Frey & Alois Stutzer, 2014. "Economic Consequences of Mispredicting Utility," Journal of Happiness Studies, Springer, vol. 15(4), pages 937-956, August.
    5. Lant Pritchett & Lawrence H. Summers, 1996. "Wealthier is Healthier," Journal of Human Resources, University of Wisconsin Press, vol. 31(4), pages 841-868.
    6. Jennifer M. Mellor & Jeffrey Milyo, 1999. "Re-Examining the Evidence of an Ecological Association between Income Inequality and Health," Discussion Papers Series, Department of Economics, Tufts University 9922, Department of Economics, Tufts University.
    7. Judge, Ken & Mulligan, Jo-Ann & Benzeval, Michaela, 0. "Income inequality and population health," Social Science & Medicine, Elsevier, vol. 46(4-5), pages 567-579, February.
    8. John Wildman & Hugh Gravelle & Matthew Sutton, 2003. "Health and income inequality: attempting to avoid the aggregation problem," Applied Economics, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 35(9), pages 999-1004.
    9. Adda, Jerome & Chandola, Tarani & Marmot, Michael, 2003. "Socio-economic status and health: causality and pathways," Journal of Econometrics, Elsevier, vol. 112(1), pages 57-63, January.
    10. Le Grand, Julian, 1987. "Inequalities in health : Some international comparisons," European Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 31(1-2), pages 182-191.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Fabrizio Carmignani & Sriram Shankar & Eng Tan & Kam Tang, 2014. "Identifying covariates of population health using extreme bound analysis," The European Journal of Health Economics, Springer;Deutsche Gesellschaft für Gesundheitsökonomie (DGGÖ), vol. 15(5), pages 515-531, June.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Tilman Tacke & Robert J. Waldmann, 2013. "Infant mortality, relative income and public policy," Applied Economics, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 45(22), pages 3240-3254, August.
    2. David Cantarero & Marta Pascual & Jose Maria Sarabia, 2004. "Can income inequality contribute to understand inequalities in health? An empirical approach based on the European Community Household Panel," ERSA conference papers ersa04p230, European Regional Science Association.
    3. Owen O'Donnell & Eddy Van Doorslaer & Tom Van Ourti, 2013. "Health and Inequality," Tinbergen Institute Discussion Papers 13-170/V, Tinbergen Institute.
    4. Angus Deaton, 2003. "Health, Inequality, and Economic Development," Journal of Economic Literature, American Economic Association, vol. 41(1), pages 113-158, March.
    5. Ken Judge & Iain Paterson, 2001. "Poverty, Income Inequality and Health," Treasury Working Paper Series 01/29, New Zealand Treasury.
    6. Marta Pascual & David Cantarero & Jose Maria Sarabia, 2004. "Trends in income inequality in the European Union: implications for health inequalities," ERSA conference papers ersa04p304, European Regional Science Association.
    7. Ram, Rati, 2006. "Further examination of the cross-country association between income inequality and population health," Social Science & Medicine, Elsevier, vol. 62(3), pages 779-791, February.
    8. Wilkinson, Richard G & Pickett, Kate E., 2006. "Income inequality and population health: A review and explanation of the evidence," Social Science & Medicine, Elsevier, vol. 62(7), pages 1768-1784, April.
    9. Ioana Pop & Erik Ingen & Wim Oorschot, 2013. "Inequality, Wealth and Health: Is Decreasing Income Inequality the Key to Create Healthier Societies?," Social Indicators Research: An International and Interdisciplinary Journal for Quality-of-Life Measurement, Springer, vol. 113(3), pages 1025-1043, September.
    10. Grönqvist, Hans & Johansson, Per & Niknami, Susan, 2012. "Income inequality and health: Lessons from a refugee residential assignment program," Journal of Health Economics, Elsevier, vol. 31(4), pages 617-629.
    11. Herzer, Dierk & Nunnenkamp, Peter, 2015. "Income inequality and health: Evidence from developed and developing countries," Economics - The Open-Access, Open-Assessment E-Journal (2007-2020), Kiel Institute for the World Economy (IfW Kiel), vol. 9, pages 1-56.
    12. Leigh, Andrew & Jencks, Christopher, 2007. "Inequality and mortality: Long-run evidence from a panel of countries," Journal of Health Economics, Elsevier, vol. 26(1), pages 1-24, January.
    13. Nejat Anbarci & Monica Escaleras & Charles Register, 2005. "Income, Income Inequality and the “Hidden Epidemic” of Traffic Fatalities," Working Papers 05002, Department of Economics, College of Business, Florida Atlantic University, revised Aug 2006.
    14. Jennifer M. Mellor & Jeffrey Milyo, 2002. "Income Inequality and Health Status in the United States: Evidence from the Current Population Survey," Journal of Human Resources, University of Wisconsin Press, vol. 37(3), pages 510-539.
    15. Angus Deaton, 2004. "Health in an Age of Globalization," NBER Working Papers 10669, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    16. Jennifer Franz & Felix R. FitzRoy, 2005. "Child mortaility, poverty and environment in developing countries," Discussion Paper Series, School of Economics and Finance 200518, School of Economics and Finance, University of St Andrews.
    17. Loree, Jacob, 2015. "State Level Income Inequality and Individual Self-Reported Health Status: Evidence from the United States," MPRA Paper 72638, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    18. Mark Berger & Jodi Messer, 2002. "Public financing of health expenditures, insurance, and health outcomes," Applied Economics, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 34(17), pages 2105-2113.
    19. Mohanty, Ranjan Kumar & Behera, Deepak Kumar, 2020. "How Effective is Public Health Care Expenditure in Improving Health Outcome? An Empirical Evidence from the Indian States," Working Papers 20/300, National Institute of Public Finance and Policy.
    20. Joan Costa-i-Font & Cristina Hernandez-Quevedo & Azusa Sato, 2013. "A 'Health Kuznets' Curve'? Cross-Country and Longitudinal Evidence," CESifo Working Paper Series 4446, CESifo.

    More about this item

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:rtv:ceisrp:146. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Barbara Piazzi (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/csrotit.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.