Increasing Disparities in Mortality by Socioeconomic Status

Barry Bosworth

doi:10.1146/annurev-publhealth-040617-014615

Annual Review of Public Health

Volume 39, 2018

Review Article

Open Access

Increasing Disparities in Mortality by Socioeconomic Status

Barry Bosworth¹
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Affiliations: Economics Studies Program, The Brookings Institution, Washington, DC 20036, USA; email: [email protected]
Vol. 39:237-251 (Volume publication date April 2018) https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-publhealth-040617-014615
Copyright © 2018 Barry Bosworth.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. See credit lines of images or other third-party material in this article for license information.

Abstract

This review focuses on the widening disparities in death rates by socioeconomic class. In recent years, there has been a major increase in the availability of data linking mortality risk and measures of socioeconomic status. The result has been a virtual explosion of new empirical research showing not only the existence of large inequities in the risk of death between those at the top and those at the bottom of the socioeconomic distribution, but also that the gaps have been growing. This assessment of the empirical research finds a consistent pattern of growing disparities within the United States. However, this widening gap in death rates does appear to be a uniquely American phenomenon, as the disparities by socioeconomic class appear to be stable or even declining in Europe and Canada.

Keyword(s): education, health, income, mortality, socioeconomic status

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2018-04-01

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