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Income Distribution, Infant Mortality, and Health Care Expenditure

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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.

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  • 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
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    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.

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