ABSTRACT

The differences in health among the developed countries appear to be a psychosocialy mediated function of income inequality. As inequality has always been one of the central concerns of sociology these relationships place the determinants of health firmly in the sociological court. One would expect income differentials to have a bigger impact on the scale of socio-economic inequalities in health within each country than they do on the population's average mortality or life expectancy. The results of a series of research projects - made possible by funding from the Economic and Social Research Council - suggest that the degree of socioeconomic inequality in developed societies is a key determinant of the average standard of health of their populations. The relationship between life expectancy and the provision of doctors per head of population was negative and just reached statistical significance, implying that developed countries with higher life expectancy had fewer doctors per head.