3 - Income, Wealth and Health

Question 1

Define income.

Answer 1

A flow of money received by an individual/household

Not routinely collected in the UK and can be quite unreliable

Cash income may be a poor reflection of resources in places with subsistence agriculture

Question 2

Define wealth.

Answer 2

A stock of money and assets, including housing

Difficult to measure reliably and not necessarily direct correlation between wealth & health

Question 3

Describe the relationship between socio-economic status(SES) and health.

Answer 3

Tends to correlate with health better for men than for women as more women do notwork, therefore their occupation may not reflet their health

Question 4

Describe the pathways from income to health.

Answer 4

Income influences health care,nutrition,behaviour,housing(facilities, quality, overcrowding), environment and stress.

Question 5

Describe the pathways from education to health.

Answer 5

Education influences nutrition, behaviour and healthcare.

Question 6

Describe fundamental cause theory(Link and Phelan, 1995).

Answer 6

SES is the fundamental cause of disease, and the diseases and mechanisms that produce SES differences in health change over time and vary with place. Higher SES people are always in a better position to access knowledge and resources to reduce their risks & SES will always cause differences in health between the rich and the poor.

Question 7

What is an example of a socio-economic categorisation of place?

Answer 7

Index of Multiple Deprivation(IMD) - main components include income(22.5%), employment(22.5%), education(13.5%) and health(13.5%), crime(9.3%), barriers to housing and services(9.3%), living environment(9.3%)

Question 8

Explain the Preston curves(Preston, 1975).

Answer 8

Preston argued that income has a non-linear effect on health as he believed rises in income only accounted for a small fraction of improvements in life expectancy at birth between 1930 and 1960 - 84% were due to advances in and diffusion of knowledge & technology

Question 9

Explain the idea of high and low health achievers(Caldwell, 1986).

Answer 9

Caldwell identified countries which ‘over-achieved’ or ‘under-achieved’ in terms of health relative to their GDP. He identified two routes to low mortality - ‘open’ societies(e.g. Sri Lanka, Costa Rica) & communist states(China, Cuba) - and both groups were characterised by a high % of GDP being devoted to health and education, with egalitratian access to health care. Good health achievers always promote universal health-care and a strong civil society.