Abstract
Alcohol-related mortality accounts for a considerable proportion of premature mortality in Finland. The end of the 1980s saw a rapid economic boom, followed by a severe recession in the 1990s. In this study, Finnish individual-level cause of death data for 1987–1995 are used to examine how alcohol-related mortality developed during this period and whether the development was similar in subgroups of the population by age, sex and socioeconomic status. A total of 6% of all deaths in the data were alcohol-related. Alcohol-related mortality increased during the economic boom and decreased slightly during the recession. Among men, the relative changes in alcohol-related mortality were largest in the youngest age group, while among women there was no systematic pattern. People with a low socioeconomic status tended to have more negative development of alcohol-related mortality, with a stronger than average increase during the economic boom and with a smaller than average decrease during the recession.
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