IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/hal/pseptp/halshs-01496908.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Child physical development in the UK: the imprint of time and socioeconomic status

Author

Listed:
  • Bénédicte Apouey

    (PSE - Paris-Jourdan Sciences Economiques - ENS-PSL - École normale supérieure - Paris - PSL - Université Paris Sciences et Lettres - INRA - Institut National de la Recherche Agronomique - EHESS - École des hautes études en sciences sociales - ENPC - École des Ponts ParisTech - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, PSE - Paris School of Economics - UP1 - Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne - ENS-PSL - École normale supérieure - Paris - PSL - Université Paris Sciences et Lettres - EHESS - École des hautes études en sciences sociales - ENPC - École des Ponts ParisTech - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique - INRAE - Institut National de Recherche pour l’Agriculture, l’Alimentation et l’Environnement)

Abstract

Objectives Social health inequalities remain a key policy challenge. The existing literature has not presented a synthetic view on the evolution of inequalities in physical development across childhood. We examine social disparities as children grow older using a range of different outcomes. Study design Population-based secondary data analysis. Methods We employ longitudinal data on British children aged 9 months to 12 years from the Millennium Cohort Study (n = 13,811–18,987) and focus on multiple child physical measures: weight, body mass index (BMI), overweight, fat mass and waist circumference. Results Higher family income is associated with lower BMI (for females), less body fat and a smaller likelihood of overweight (for both genders) on average throughout childhood. When income is multiplied by 3, the probability of overweight decreases by 2.8 (95% CI −0.041 to −0.016) percentage points for females and by 2.7 (95% CI −0.038 to −0.016) percentage points for males. Social inequalities in weight, BMI, overweight and body fat significantly widen as children grow older, for both genders. For instance, for females, when income is multiplied by 3, the probability of overweight decreases by 1.6 (95% CI −0.032 to −0.000) percentage points at ages 2–3 years, but by 8.6 (95% CI −0.112 to −0.060) percentage points at ages 10–12 years. Conclusions The trajectory of social inequalities, which may reflect the cumulative effect of family socioeconomic status, is a precursor of inequalities in adulthood.

Suggested Citation

  • Bénédicte Apouey, 2016. "Child physical development in the UK: the imprint of time and socioeconomic status," PSE-Ecole d'économie de Paris (Postprint) halshs-01496908, HAL.
    • Handle: RePEc:hal:pseptp:halshs-01496908
    DOI: 10.1016/j.puhe.2016.09.004
    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 search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    Other versions of this item:

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Apouey, Bénédicte & Geoffard, Pierre-Yves, 2013. "Family income and child health in the UK," Journal of Health Economics, Elsevier, vol. 32(4), pages 715-727.
    2. repec:pri:rpdevs:case_paxson_vogl_15090%20w12267.pdf is not listed on IDEAS
    3. Case, Anne & Paxson, Christina & Vogl, Tom, 2007. "Socioeconomic status and health in childhood: A comment on Chen, Martin and Matthews, "Socioeconomic status and health: Do gradients differ within childhood and adolescence?" (62:9, 2006, 21," Social Science & Medicine, Elsevier, vol. 64(4), pages 757-761, February.
    4. Murasko, Jason E., 2009. "Socioeconomic status, height, and obesity in children," Economics & Human Biology, Elsevier, vol. 7(3), pages 376-386, December.
    5. repec:pri:cheawb:case_socioecon_status_health_childhood_ac_cp_tv is not listed on IDEAS
    6. repec:hal:pseose:halshs-00876618 is not listed on IDEAS
    7. Chen, Edith & Martin, Andrew D. & Matthews, Karen A., 2006. "Socioeconomic status and health: Do gradients differ within childhood and adolescence?," Social Science & Medicine, Elsevier, vol. 62(9), pages 2161-2170, May.
    8. David A. Wise, 2005. "Analyses in the Economics of Aging," NBER Books, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc, number wise05-1.
    9. Anne Case & Christina Paxson & Tom Vogl, 2006. "Socioeconomic Status and Health in Childhood: A Comment on Chen, Martin and Matthews (2006)," NBER Working Papers 12267, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    10. West, Patrick, 1997. "Health inequalities in the early years: Is there equalisation in youth?," Social Science & Medicine, Elsevier, vol. 44(6), pages 833-858, March.
    11. Anne Case & Angus S. Deaton, 2005. "Broken Down by Work and Sex: How Our Health Declines," NBER Chapters, in: Analyses in the Economics of Aging, pages 185-212, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    12. Carol Propper & John Rigg & Simon Burgess, 2007. "Child health: evidence on the roles of family income and maternal mental health from a UK birth cohort," Health Economics, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 16(11), pages 1245-1269.
    13. repec:pri:cheawb:case_socioecon_status_health_childhood_ac_cp_tv.pdf is not listed on IDEAS
    14. Costa-Font, Joan & Gil, Joan, 2013. "Intergenerational and socioeconomic gradients of child obesity," Social Science & Medicine, Elsevier, vol. 93(C), pages 29-37.
    15. Murasko, Jason E., 2013. "Associations between household income, height, and BMI in contemporary US schoolchildren," Economics & Human Biology, Elsevier, vol. 11(2), pages 185-196.
    16. Kuehnle, Daniel, 2014. "The causal effect of family income on child health in the UK," Journal of Health Economics, Elsevier, vol. 36(C), pages 137-150.
    17. repec:pri:rpdevs:case_paxson_vogl_15090%20w12267 is not listed on IDEAS
    18. Anne Case & Christina Paxson & Tom Vogl, 2006. "Socioeconomic Status and Health in Childhood: A Comment on Chen, Martin and Matthews," Working Papers 157, Princeton University, Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, Research Program in Development Studies..
    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. Qi, Di & Wu, Yichao, 2020. "Family’s social economic status and child educational outcomes in China: The mediating effects of parenting practices and children’s learning attitudes," Children and Youth Services Review, Elsevier, vol. 118(C).

    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. Apouey, Bénédicte H. & Geoffard, Pierre-Yves, 2016. "Parents’ education and child body weight in France: The trajectory of the gradient in the early years," Economics & Human Biology, Elsevier, vol. 20(C), pages 70-89.
    2. Murasko, Jason E., 2008. "An evaluation of the age-profile in the relationship between household income and the health of children in the United States," Journal of Health Economics, Elsevier, vol. 27(6), pages 1489-1502, December.
    3. Currie, Candace & Molcho, Michal & Boyce, William & Holstein, Bjørn & Torsheim, Torbjørn & Richter, Matthias, 2008. "Researching health inequalities in adolescents: The development of the Health Behaviour in School-Aged Children (HBSC) Family Affluence Scale," Social Science & Medicine, Elsevier, vol. 66(6), pages 1429-1436, March.
    4. Jason Murasko, 2015. "The Age Profile of the Income–Health Gradient: An Evaluation of Two Large Cohorts of Contemporary US Children," Journal of Family and Economic Issues, Springer, vol. 36(2), pages 289-298, June.
    5. Swaminathan, Harini & Sharma, Anurag & Shah, Narendra G., 2019. "Does the relationship between income and child health differ across income groups? Evidence from India," Economic Modelling, Elsevier, vol. 79(C), pages 57-73.
    6. Kahouli, Sondès, 2020. "An economic approach to the study of the relationship between housing hazards and health: The case of residential fuel poverty in France," Energy Economics, Elsevier, vol. 85(C).
    7. Khanam, Rasheda & Nghiem, Hong Son & Connelly, Luke B., 2009. "Child health and the income gradient: Evidence from Australia," Journal of Health Economics, Elsevier, vol. 28(4), pages 805-817, July.
    8. Rasheda Khanam & Son Nghiem & Maisha Rahman, 2020. "The income gradient and child mental health in Australia: does it vary by assessors?," The European Journal of Health Economics, Springer;Deutsche Gesellschaft für Gesundheitsökonomie (DGGÖ), vol. 21(1), pages 19-36, February.
    9. Le, Huong & Nguyen, Ha, 2015. "Intergenerational transmission in health: Causal estimates from fixed effects instrumental variables models for two cohorts of Australian children," MPRA Paper 68175, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    10. Sepehri, Ardeshir & Guliani, Harminder, 2015. "Socioeconomic status and children's health: Evidence from a low-income country," Social Science & Medicine, Elsevier, vol. 130(C), pages 23-31.
    11. Bénédicte Apouey & Pierre-Yves Geoffard, 2013. "Child health and use of health care services in France: Evidence on the role of family income," Working Papers halshs-00908932, HAL.
    12. Anne Nolan & Richard Layte, 2014. "Socio-economic Inequalities in Child Health in Ireland," The Economic and Social Review, Economic and Social Studies, vol. 45(1), pages 25-64.
    13. Jon Ivar Elstad & Axel West Pedersen, 2012. "The Impact of Relative Poverty on Norwegian Adolescents’ Subjective Health: A Causal Analysis with Propensity Score Matching," IJERPH, MDPI, vol. 9(12), pages 1-17, December.
    14. Toshiaki Aizawa, 2020. "Trajectory of inequality of opportunity in child height growth: Evidence from the Young Lives study," Demographic Research, Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Rostock, Germany, vol. 42(7), pages 165-202.
    15. Kuehnle, Daniel, 2014. "The causal effect of family income on child health in the UK," Journal of Health Economics, Elsevier, vol. 36(C), pages 137-150.
    16. Joseph Wolfe, 2015. "The Effects of Socioeconomic Status on Child and Adolescent Physical Health: An Organization and Systematic Comparison of Measures," Social Indicators Research: An International and Interdisciplinary Journal for Quality-of-Life Measurement, Springer, vol. 123(1), pages 39-58, August.
    17. Otto Lenhart, 2019. "The effects of income on health: new evidence from the Earned Income Tax Credit," Review of Economics of the Household, Springer, vol. 17(2), pages 377-410, June.
    18. Galama, Titus & Kapteyn, Arie, 2011. "Grossman’s missing health threshold," Journal of Health Economics, Elsevier, vol. 30(5), pages 1044-1056.
    19. Thomas Barnay, 2016. "Health, work and working conditions: a review of the European economic literature," The European Journal of Health Economics, Springer;Deutsche Gesellschaft für Gesundheitsökonomie (DGGÖ), vol. 17(6), pages 693-709, July.
    20. Cédric Afsa & Pauline Givord, 2009. "Le rôle des conditions de travail dans les absences pour maladie : le cas des horaires irréguliers," Économie et Prévision, Programme National Persée, vol. 187(1), pages 83-103.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Longitudinal studies; Inequalities; Socioeconomic status; Child; Physical development;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • I14 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Health - - - Health and Inequality
    • I18 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Health - - - Government Policy; Regulation; Public Health

    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:hal:pseptp:halshs-01496908. 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: Caroline Bauer (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/ .

    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.