Why is greater income inequality associated with lower life satisfaction and poorer health? Evidence from the European Quality of Life Survey, 2012

Article


Nettle, D. and Dickins, T. 2022. Why is greater income inequality associated with lower life satisfaction and poorer health? Evidence from the European Quality of Life Survey, 2012. The Social Science Journal. https://doi.org/10.1080/03623319.2022.2117888
TypeArticle
TitleWhy is greater income inequality associated with lower life satisfaction and poorer health? Evidence from the European Quality of Life Survey, 2012
AuthorsNettle, D. and Dickins, T.
Abstract

Greater income inequality is associated with lower average wellbeing. There are multiple possible explanations for this pattern. We use data from the European Quality of Life Survey 2012 (27,571 respondents from 28 countries) to evaluate the contributions of different causal pathways to associations between national income inequality and wellbeing. In unadjusted analyses, greater income inequality was associated with lower life satisfaction and poorer self-rated health. For life satisfaction, 43% of the association was attributable to individual income effects, and 41% to worse public services (especially access to healthcare). The association between income inequality and self-rated health was mainly (68%) due to individual income effects. For life satisfaction but not self-rated health, we found some evidence of costs of inequality that fall on those with high incomes. We conclude that the negative associations between income inequality and wellbeing across European countries are substantially, but not entirely, due to individual income effects.

KeywordsInequality; Poverty; Life satisfaction; Wellbeing; Public services
Sustainable Development Goals10 Reduced inequalities
Middlesex University ThemeHealth & Wellbeing
Research GroupBehavioural Biology group
PublisherTaylor & Francis (Routledge)
JournalThe Social Science Journal
ISSN0362-3319
Electronic1873-5355
Publication dates
Online09 Sep 2022
Publication process dates
Deposited09 Sep 2022
Submitted24 May 2022
Accepted02 Aug 2022
Output statusIn press
Publisher's version
License
Copyright Statement

© 2022 The Author(s). Published with license by Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way.

Digital Object Identifier (DOI)https://doi.org/10.1080/03623319.2022.2117888
Web of Science identifierWOS:000852201900001
LanguageEnglish
Page range1-12
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