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Health conditions in regions of Eastern and Western Europe

  • Original Article
  • Published:
International Journal of Public Health

Abstract

Objectives

We report health conditions in the regions of the European Union (EU) from both objective and subjective perspectives and verify whether drawing conclusions regarding the health conditions in different countries without considering the countries’ sub-national variability may lead to inaccurate results.

Methods

To depict health conditions in the EU regions, two classification methods are used: (1) hierarchical clustering with Ward’s method and squared Euclidean distance and (2) k-mean clustering. To illustrate the intra-country variability of health conditions, the coefficients of variation are computed.

Results

Health conditions are considerably better in the western regions of the EU. Objective and subjective health measures do not always coincide. Extensive within-country differences in health conditions exist.

Conclusions

The EU is clearly split into the EU-15 and Central and Eastern European countries; however, this division is observed with respect to objective health conditions only. Inclusion of self-perceived health status in the analysis measures considerably changes this picture.

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Acknowledgments

Data on objective health used in the analysis were provided by Lewis Dijkstra to whom the author is grateful. The author is also deeply indebted to Paola Annoni, Piotr Bialowolski, Lewis Dijkstra and two anonymous reviewers for advice, support and comments that helped to clarify the author's intentions, results and conclusions of the text.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Econometrics and Applied Statistics Unit, European Commission-Joint Research Centre, Institute for the Protection and Security of the Citizen, Ispra, Italy

    Dorota Weziak-Bialowolska

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  1. Dorota Weziak-Bialowolska
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Dorota Weziak-Bialowolska.

Additional information

This paper is based on data from Eurostat, EU statistics on income and living conditions. The responsibility for all conclusions drawn from the data lies entirely with the author.

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Weziak-Bialowolska, D. Health conditions in regions of Eastern and Western Europe. Int J Public Health 59, 529–539 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00038-014-0548-8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00038-014-0548-8

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