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Socioeconomics and the Macro- and Micro-level Determinants of Global Health Inequality

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Handbook of Global Health

Abstract

Living long and healthy lives is among the most highly valued and universal human goals. Therefore, the unprecedented increases in life expectancy that have been observed all over the world during the last decades should be welcomed as a major social achievement. However, at the same time, differences in health and mortality between low and high socioeconomic groups are becoming increasingly large. To acquire a proper understanding of the present and future dynamics in human health and mortality, scholars have recently started paying attention to inequality within socioeconomic groups. This chapter starts off by proving a short summary of differential health studies performed at the micro and macro level before presenting several approaches to measure health inequalities. The authors then provide empirical evidence at the macro level for associations between socioeconomic development indicators (GDP per capita and education) and life expectancy for most countries in the world as well as between life expectancy and lifespan variability. For 29 European countries the bivariate associations between life expectancy and healthy life expectancy (according to sex) is also investigated as well as between healthy life expectancy and the two socioeconomic indicators. The findings reported in the chapter suggest that the world is facing a new challenge: As mortality retreats to increasingly older ages, the surviving population becomes increasingly heterogeneous (i.e., mixing frail and strong individuals), a key issue that should be taken into consideration by policy-makers and health planners around the world in the coming decades.

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Acknowledgements

Funding: The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC-2014-StG-637768, EQUALIZE project); the Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities “Ramón y Cajal” Research Grant Program (RYC-2013-14196, RYC-2013-14851); and its National R&D&I Plan GLOBFAM (RTI2018-096730-B-I00).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Centre d’Estudis Demogràfics, Edifici E-2, Carrer de Ca n’Altayó, UAB Campus, Bellaterra, Spain

    Iñaki Permanyer & Jeroen Spijker

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  1. Iñaki Permanyer
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  2. Jeroen Spijker
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Correspondence to Jeroen Spijker .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Graduate Institute of International and Global Health Programme, Geneva, Switzerland

    Ilona Kickbusch

  2. Charité Foundation, Berlin, Germany

    Detlev Ganten

  3. World Health Organization, Regional Office, Brazzaville, Congo, Demographic Republic (Zaire)

    Matshidiso Moeti

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Permanyer, I., Spijker, J. (2021). Socioeconomics and the Macro- and Micro-level Determinants of Global Health Inequality. In: Kickbusch, I., Ganten, D., Moeti, M. (eds) Handbook of Global Health. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45009-0_50

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