Abstract

This article deals with the relationship between economic inequality and health. It first reviews the most common hypotheses about how inequality might affect health and vice versa. It then turns to an assessment of the empirical evidence for a link between health and inequality. It emphasizes that the cross-sectional relationship between inequality and health is quite likely to provide biased estimates so use of panel data and appropriate techniques represents a significant advance in the literature to date. The evidence for a relationship between inequality and health is found to be weak, and the field is characterized as one with too many theories for the number of available data points at this time.