Income inequality and health. Coastal communities in British Columbia, Canada.

OBJECTIVE An imbalance in the distribution of economic resources, i.e., income inequality, is a characteristic of a community that may influence the aggregate health of the population. In North America, income inequality seems to be strongly related to mortality rates among American communities such as states and metropolitan areas but largely irrelevant for health at similar levels of geopolitical aggregation in Canada. This article summarizes relevant international and North American evidence and then explores relationships between income inequality and mortality rates among coastal communities in the province of British Columbia, Canada. METHODS Cross-sectional analysis was conducted among twenty-four coastal communities in British Columbia, utilizing four measures based on the 1996 Census to measure income inequality and crude, age-standardized and age- and gender-specific mortality rates averaged over the five-year period 1994-98 to measure health. RESULTS The three valid measures of income inequality were positively and significantly related to the crude mortality rate but were not significantly related to the age-standardized mortality rate. Two of the inequality measures were related to mortality rates for males aged 0-44 and for males aged 45-64 before but not after controlling for mean household income. DISCUSSION Health researchers have yet to report a meaningful relationship between income inequality and population health within Canada. At the risk of committing the ecological fallacy, these findings provisionally support a psycho-social interpretation of the individual-level relationship between income and health wherein members of these communities compare themselves to an encompassing community, e.g., all Canadians.