ABSTRACT
This chapter examines inequalities in health at different geographical scales – between individuals, neighborhoods, cities, regions, and countries. It outlines how the discipline of health geography has traditionally explained these health divides – in terms of the effects of compositional and contextual factors, and the relational interaction of people with the wider environment. It outlines the analytical limits of these traditional approaches in terms of advancing our understanding of the relationship between health and place through outlining an alternative political economy approach. The latter scales up our conceptualization of context so that it also includes the influence of national and international political and economic factors. It then applies the political economy approach to explain international trends in health inequalities over the last 70 years, from the Great Compression to the global COVID-19 pandemic.
