Socioeconomic differences in health, health behaviour and access to health care in Armenia, Belarus, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, the Republic of Moldova, the Russian Federation and Ukraine

This publication presents tables summarizing the distribution of health, health behaviour, health care access and social capital by socioeconomic status, gender and residence (urban and rural) in eight countries of the former Soviet Union (FSU) – Armenia, Belarus, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, the Republic of Moldova, the Russian Federation and Ukraine – from October to December 2001. The data come from the Living Conditions, Lifestyles and Health (LLH) Project, which conducted representative surveys in these countries (Institute for Advanced Studies, 2004). The statistics are descriptive and do not reflect causal relationships between socioeconomic status and health. This report is intended as a reference tool and to widen access to the data collected through the LLH Project, the first to implement cross-country, comparable health outcome and behaviour surveys in the FSU. The format of the data representation is inspired by and follows the model provided by Gwatkin et al. (2007), but differs in a number of respects: • the data source used (Gwatkin et al. used data from the Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) Program); • the countries covered (the DHS include very few FSU countries); • many of the variables considered; and • the proxy of socioeconomic status. To represent socioeconomic status, we constructed a deprivation index based on the prevalence of various household characteristics, such as the quality of the immediate environment and the presence of certain consumer goods. On the basis of the index, we divided the population into “asset” quintiles (five subgroups, all having the same number of people), ranging from the most to least deprived. The socioeconomic status represented in these tables is a multidimensional measure of poverty that takes account not just of monetary wealth but also of the relative level of deprivation.