Unemployment and Mortality in England and Wales: A Preliminary Analysis

In recent years a furious debate has raged in medical and health journals about the harmful effects of unemployment. Except for a few forays by economists, the debate has been between psychologists, epidemiologists, demographers and sociologists (see Smith (1985), Brenner (1979), Brenner and Mooney (1982), Stern (1983), Gravelle et al (1981), Moser et al. (1981, 1986, 1987), Warr (1983) and Platt (1982)). In this debate the general finding is that unemployment is a particularly stressful state which leads to physical and mental illness and, in extreme cases, to suicide, para-suicide or death. Economists, however, have taken issue on statistical grounds and dispute the findings: they argue that the verdict should be at best ‘not-proven’. The aim of this paper is to provide a preliminary analysis of the relationship between unemployment and mortality using some limited data from the OPCS. The conclusions of this work are that there is a positive association between unemployment and mortality.