ABSTRACT
This chapter utilizes two longitudinal datasets, namely the National Child Development Study (NCDS) and the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS) to look at the relationship between some measures of poverty at various points in the past and measures of health. This adds substantially to the sorts of conclusions one is able to draw when using purely cross-sectional data, although it is still difficult to disentangle all the possible directions of causality in the income/health relationship. The chapter describes the two datasets and in particular the measures of income and health which are employed. It then examines various aspects of the income health relationship in each dataset: first cross-sectionally and then over time. Given the nature of the data, the most direct comparison that can be made between the two datasets is in the correlation between contemporaneous health and income. For illustrative purpose, the chapter shows this association for each dataset and explores the longitudinal relationship in more detail.
