Abstract
Objectives
We aimed to examine the cross-national and cross-temporal association between poverty and mortality, in particular differentiating the impact of absolute and relative poverty.
Methods
We employed pooled cross-sectional time series analysis. Our measure of relative poverty was based upon the standard 60 % of median income. The measure of absolute, or fixed, poverty was based upon the US poverty threshold. Our analyses were conducted on data for 30 countries between 1978 and 2010, a total of 149 data points. We separately studied infant, child, and adult mortality.
Results
Our findings highlight the importance of relative poverty for mortality. Especially for infant and child mortality, we found that our estimates of fixed poverty is close to zero either in the crude models, or when adjusting for gross domestic product. Conversely, the relative poverty estimates increased when adjusting for confounders. Our results seemed robust to a number of sensitivity tests.
Conclusions
If we agree that risk of death is important, the public policy implication of our findings is that relative poverty, which has close associations to overall inequality, should be a major concern also among rich countries.
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Acknowledgments
The research leading to these results was carried out as part of the Inequality Impacts project, funded by the Joint Committee for Nordic Research Councils for the Humanities and the Social Sciences (NOS-HS), project no. 219643/F10, and the DRIVERS project (www.health-gradient.eu), coordinated by EuroHealthNet, funded by the European Union (FP7 2007-2013) under grant agreement no. 278350. Earlier versions of the paper have been presented at the 11th Annual ESPAnet Conference in Poznan, Poland, 5–7 September 2013 and at meetings held in connection with the DRIVERS project. We thank participants for comments on these occasions.
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Fritzell, J., Rehnberg, J., Bacchus Hertzman, J. et al. Absolute or relative? A comparative analysis of the relationship between poverty and mortality. Int J Public Health 60, 101–110 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00038-014-0614-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00038-014-0614-2