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IJE Advance Access originally published online on June 5, 2007
International Journal of Epidemiology 2007 36(3):492-494; doi:10.1093/ije/dym077
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Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the International Epidemiological Association © The Author 2007; all rights reserved.

Commentary: The changing relation between mortality and income

Richard G Wilkinson

Division of Epidemiology & Public Health, University of Nottingham Medical School, Nottingham NG7 2UH, UK.

E-mail: Richard.Wilkinson@Nottingham.ac.uk

Accepted 10 April 2006

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

Understanding the relation between economic development and health is one of the most intriguing problems facing public health. Living standards and longevity have improved together, but the relation between them is not straight forward. Preston1 provided us with the bare bones of the puzzle: there are very close cross-sectional relationships (correlation coefficients of between 0.8 and 0.9) between the log of national income per head and life expectancy at birth. Yet while this cross-sectional relation is maintained over time, only between 10 and 25% of the improvement in life expectancy over time is attributable to increases in income. Preston's analysis centred on the period 1930 to 1960, but The World Bank2 added curves for 1900 and 1990 to those Preston drew relating life expectancy to national income per head. They show that the explanatory problem he set is not a special case.

So what are the possible explanations? After showing . . . [Full Text of this Article]


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