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Social Indicators Research
Published in: Social Indicators Research 3/2019

15-05-2019 | Original Research

Which Income Inequality Influences Which Health Indicators? Analysis of the Income Inequality Hypothesis with Market and Disposable Gini Indicators

Author: Ki-tae Kim

Published in: Social Indicators Research | Issue 3/2019

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Abstract

Recent cross-national health studies growingly refute the income inequality hypothesis on the relationship between income inequality and aggregate health after adjusting for control variables with updated international datasets. Few of them, however, use a market income inequality indicator as an independent variable. While the latter measures the exact amounts pocketed by each individual, the former could be related to an individual’s social or economic status. The pooled TSCS regression for the selected 26 industrialized nations over 1995–2010 test the hypothesis with three different income inequality indicators: disposable and market income Gini and ‘tax and transfer effect’. We used the OECD dataset. The disposable income inequality does not have a statistically significant relationship with any of the health indicators except for infant mortality. The market income Gini does have a statistically significant association only with female life expectancy. The relationship between income inequality indicators and health outcomes are dynamic and not consistent.
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Footnotes
1
This article uses the term of time-series cross-section (TSCS) data instead of panel data following the definition by Beck and Katz (2004) stating that panel studies have single digit T’s with 3 being a common value while the TSCS data sets with T’s of twenty or more. It should be noted that there is no basic difference between methods for the two kinds of datasets (Beck and Katz 2004; Jank and Shmueli 2004).
 
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Metadata
Title
Which Income Inequality Influences Which Health Indicators? Analysis of the Income Inequality Hypothesis with Market and Disposable Gini Indicators
Author
Ki-tae Kim
Publication date
15-05-2019
Publisher
Springer Netherlands
Published in
Social Indicators Research / Issue 3/2019
Print ISSN: 0303-8300
Electronic ISSN: 1573-0921
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/s11205-019-02129-5

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