Social Determinants of Health Inequalities – a Global Perspective Study

Goran Miladinov, Independent Researcher

Health inequalities persist among all countries and are usually explained by health behaviors and social conditions in which people work and live. This paper aims to investigate the relative contribution of the social determinants to life expectancy at birth as a proxy measure of lifespan disparities in low-income, middle-income and high-income countries. The Combinatorial VARSEL technique was used to measure the impact of the social determinants on the population across the three groups of countries. Data from these three groups of countries was obtained from the UN and World Bank. The magnitude of the impact of social determinants on population health varied considerably between countries. While poverty issues and vulnerable employment as well as access to clean water and sanitation were found to contribute to the explanation of variation of life expectancy in low-income countries, educational and poverty determinants emerged as the leading causes of life expectancy variations across middle-income countries. GNI per capita with access to clean water and sanitation were mostly contributing determinants for life expectancy in high-income countries. The observed effects of different social determinants on population health across the world indicate that tackling health inequality should be a task beyond focusing on a single social determinant.

Keywords: Inequality, Disadvantage and Discrimination, Computational social science methods, Mortality and Longevity, Digital and computational demography

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