IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/cor/louvrp/3141.html

COVID-19 and the role of inequality in French regional departments

Author

Listed:
  • Ginsburgh, Victor

    (Université catholique de Louvain, LIDAM/CORE, Belgium)

  • Magerman, Glenn
  • Natali, Ilaria

Abstract

In this paper, we examine the variation in the outbreak of COVID-19 across departments in continental France. We use information on the cumulated number of deaths, discharged patients and infections from COVID-19 at the department level, and study how these relate to income inequality, controlling for other factors. We fnd that unfortunately, inequality kills: departments with higher income inequality face more deaths, more discharged (gravely ill) patients and more infections. While other papers have studied the impact of the level of income on the severity of COVID-19, we fnd that it is in fact the dispersion across incomes within the same department that drives the results. Our results suggest that individuals in relatively more precarious conditions deserve dedicated policies, to avoid that temporary shocks such as COVID-19 lead to permanent increases in inequality.

Suggested Citation

  • Ginsburgh, Victor & Magerman, Glenn & Natali, Ilaria, 2021. "COVID-19 and the role of inequality in French regional departments," LIDAM Reprints CORE 3141, Université catholique de Louvain, Center for Operations Research and Econometrics (CORE).
    • Handle: RePEc:cor:louvrp:3141
    DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10198-020-01254-0
    Note: In: The European Journal of Health Economics, 2021, vol. 22, p. 311-327
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a
    for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    Other versions of this item:

    Citations

    Blog mentions

    As found by EconAcademics.org, the blog aggregator for Economics research:
    1. Chris Sampson’s journal round-up for 22nd March 2021
      by Chris Sampson in The Academic Health Economists' Blog on 2021-03-22 12:00:01

    Citations

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


    Cited by:

    1. Steven Stillman & Mirco Tonin, 2022. "Communities and testing for COVID-19," The European Journal of Health Economics, Springer;Deutsche Gesellschaft für Gesundheitsökonomie (DGGÖ), vol. 23(4), pages 617-625, June.
    2. Antonicelli, Margareth & Drago, Carlo & Costantiello, Alberto & Leogrande, Angelo, 2025. "Analyzing Income Inequalities across Italian regions: Instrumental Variable Panel Data, K-Means Clustering and Machine Learning Algorithms," OSF Preprints tk87m_v1, Center for Open Science.
    3. Bello, Piera & Rocco, Lorenzo, 2022. "Education and COVID-19 excess mortality," Economics & Human Biology, Elsevier, vol. 47(C).
    4. Akbar Zamanzadeh & Tony Cavoli, 2022. "The effect of nonpharmaceutical interventions on COVID-19 infections for lower and middle-income countries: A debiased LASSO approach," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 17(7), pages 1-17, July.
    5. Ana Suárez à lvarez & Ana Jesús López Menéndez, 2021. "Approaching The Impact Of Covid-19 From An Inequality Of Opportunity Perspective: An Analysis Of European Countries," Working Papers 595, ECINEQ, Society for the Study of Economic Inequality.
    6. Jurgita Markevičiūtė & Jolita Bernatavičienė & Rūta Levulienė & Viktor Medvedev & Povilas Treigys & Julius Venskus, 2022. "Impact of COVID-19-Related Lockdown Measures on Economic and Social Outcomes in Lithuania," Mathematics, MDPI, vol. 10(15), pages 1-20, August.
    7. Ilaria Natali & Mathias Dewatripont & Victor Ginsburgh & Michel Goldman & Patrick Legros, 2023. "Prescription opioids and economic hardship in France," The European Journal of Health Economics, Springer;Deutsche Gesellschaft für Gesundheitsökonomie (DGGÖ), vol. 24(9), pages 1473-1504, December.
    8. Bello, Piera & Rocco, Lorenzo, 2021. "Education, Information, and COVID-19 Excess Mortality," IZA Discussion Papers 14402, Institute of Labor Economics (IZA).
    9. Sévérin TAMWO & Etayibtalnam KOUDJOM & Aurelien KAMDEM YEYOUOMO, 2024. "Effects of income inequality on COVID-19 in Africa: Accounting for literacy and informal sector," Region et Developpement, Region et Developpement, LEAD, Universite du Sud - Toulon Var, vol. 60, pages 91-111.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    ;
    ;
    ;

    JEL classification:

    • I10 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Health - - - General
    • I14 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Health - - - Health and Inequality

    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:cor:louvrp:3141. 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.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using 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: Alain GILLIS (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/coreebe.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.