The economic benefit of reducing health inequalities in 11 European populations

In recent years there has been growing interest in studying the socio-economic inequalities in health. In this paper we use longitudinal data from SHARE survey to estimate the age and sex specific mortality rates by socioeconomic status (SES) for 10 European countries with the aim of studying the benefits of reducing mortality in the most disadvantaged classes. First, we describe the existing inequalities by estimating the influence of SES (measured by two different proxies: the household total net worth and the education) on mortality between waves using Cox survival regression models. In a second step, we construct life tables for each combination of country, sex and SES, and we estimated the number of real deaths in the population. Then, some "inequality reduction" scenarios are depicted by reducing the SES gradient for each country and providing an estimate of the hypothetical saved life-years.