The influence of health resources on income inequality in Europe

Abstract

In recent times, there has been an increase in social and health research focused on improving citizens’ health and equity. Therefore, the main objective of this research is to analyze how health resources influence income inequality and, through this, to understand the relevance of public health policies on social equity. For this purpose, unbalanced panel data from 32 European countries were used for the period 2005–2020 and a random effects model is employed. Results show different values depending on the type of expenditure considered in the model and whether robust errors are applied during estimation, but in general they indicate a significant negative influence of most of the health variables used on income inequality, especially public health expenditure. In contrast, the number of physicians per 1000 inhabitants seem to encourage inequality, which could be due to inefficiencies in the allocation of this resource. Regarding the incorporation of dummy variables into the models, it can be concluded that income inequality in countries with a mixed health system is not significantly different from that in countries with a national health system, while such inequality is lower in countries with a social health insurance system than in those with a national health system, although the difference is not significant with robust errors. All this shows that public health policies aimed at increasing investment in health can be a great support in the fight against income inequality, especially those that impact equity in the financing and distribution of health resources.