ABSTRACT
In Britain, as in other developed countries, variations in morbidity and mortality have been associated with a wide variety of measures of socioeconomic status including car ownership, housing tenure, occupational class, overcrowding, education, and unemployment. Cross sectional evidence suggesting that there is a significant tendency for mortality to be lower in countries with a more egalitarian distribution of income does exist. The relation between average income and life expectancy was assessed using figures of gross national product per head for 23 countries in the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development. To provide a more demanding test of the relation with income distribution changes in income distribution between two dates were compared with changes in life expectancy in different countries. The relation between income distribution and life expectancy is sufficiently strong to produce significant associations in analyses of cross sectional data and of data covering changes over time, despite the small number of countries for which compatible data are available.
