ABSTRACT
The diseases most strongly related to socioeconomic status within each country vary from one country to another. France for instance has very large inequalities in alcohol-related causes of death and in cancers, whereas for deaths from heart disease it has a slight inverse gradient. In contrast to France, both Sweden and England have much smaller inequalities in mortality from cancers, but show substantially higher rates of heart disease lower down the social scale (Kunst and Mackenbach, forthcoming 1996). There seems to be a tendency for countries having an unusually high death rate from a particular cause to have within it particularly large socioeconomic differences in death rates from the same cause. Examples include alcohol-related deaths in France, deaths from violence in the United States, and from heart disease and respiratory diseases in England and Wales. This might imply that the way of life of the upper socioeconomic groups in each country is more internationalised and so more homogeneous across countries. In contrast, lower socioeconomic groups are perhaps more likely to show the cultural characteristics particular to each country.
