BACKGROUND Inequalities in health have received considerable attention from health scientists and economists. In South Africa, inequalities exist in socio-economic status (SES) and in access to basic social services and are exacerbated by inequalities in health. While health systems, together with the wider social determinants of health, are relevant in seeking to improve health status and heal...

BACKGROUND Disparities in health outcomes between the poor and the better off are increasingly attracting attention from researchers and policy makers. However, policies aimed at reducing inequity need to be based on evidence of their nature, magnitude, and determinants. OBJECTIVES The study aims to investigate the relationship between household socio-economic status (SES) and under-five mort...

BACKGROUND Human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) is a significant contributor to Malawi's burden of disease. Despite a number of studies describing socio-economic differences in HIV prevalence, there is a paucity of evidence on socio-economic inequity in HIV testing in Malawi. OBJECTIVE To assess horizontal inequity (HI) in HIV testing in Malawi. DESIGN Data from the Demographic and Health Sur...

Income Inequality and Job Satisfaction of Full-Time Employees in Germany Using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel Study (GSOEP), it is shown that income comparison with persons who are better off has a clear impact on the job satisfaction of West German full-time employees. Two contrary effects can be identified. On the one hand, there is an aversion to disadvantageous regional income in...

This paper evaluates two well-known models of growth with inequality that have explicit micro underpinnings related to household choice. With incomplete markets or transactions costs, wealth can constrain investment in business and the choice of occupation and also constrain the timing of entry into the formal financial sector. Using the Thai Socio-Economic Survey (SES), we estimate the distrib...

The digital divide is nowadays evolving to digital inequality, i.e., the socio-economic disparities inside the ‘online population’. This paper examines two main dimensions of the digital inequality, namely ‘skills’ and ‘autonomy’ of Internet users. The level of formal education was selected as a representative variable of the skill dimension, as well as the density of population in different ge...

BACKGROUND We describe trends from 1951 to 2006 in inequalities in mortality between the indigenous (Māori) and non-indigenous (non-Māori, mainly European-descended) populations of New Zealand. We relate these trends to the historical context in which they occurred, including major structural adjustment of the economy from the mid 1980s to the mid 1990s, followed by a retreat from neoliberal so...

Regional policy makers and researchers or national policy makers concerned with the regional impact of their decisions rely on the availability of detailed and current small area data to inform their decision making. However, in the past it has been difficult to assess income levels and inequality, wealth, poverty, disadvantage and other socio-economic characteristics at a detailed regional lev...

Data from a national sample of 1255 adults who were part of the MIDUS (Mid-life in the U.S.) follow-up study and agreed to participate in a clinic-based in-depth assessment of their health status were used to test the hypothesis that, quite part from income or educational status, perceptions of lower achieved rank relative to others and of relative inequality in key life domains would be associ...

In this paper we evaluate trends in levels of economic vulnerability in Ireland during the period 1994-2001. We also document changes in the consequences of such vulnerability for social exclusion and in the social demographic factors with which it is associated. Over time there was a sharp decline in economic vulnerability. Furthermore, the degree of differentiation between the vulnerable and ...