The Link Between Health and Socioeconomic, Environmental and Demographics Factors

According to the World Health Organization (WHO, 1978), health can be defined not only in terms of absence of disease, injury or infirmity, but also, as a state of mental, physical and social well-being. Over the last decades, many studies have emphasized the role of social circumstances on health status. The tight link between health and a wide range of socioeconomic, environmental and demographics factors have been increasingly recognized and proffer an alternative perspective on how to consider public health, social justice and even restructuring of the health care system (Daniels et. al., 2004). The increasingly acknowledgement that health is also a result of cumulative experience of social conditions and exposure to environmental contexts throughout the life course, has been leading to a ‘renewed interest’ (Anand and Peter, 2004) and a growing concern for Global Organizations (World Bank and OECD ).

The socio-economic determinants of health have been researched extensively, and health inequalities arises as a remarkable implication, since there are consistent evidences indicating that people from less favorable socioeconomic groups are more likely to suffer from higher rates of illness and mortality than the better off (see Kaplan, 1996; Wagstaff, 2000; World Bank, 1997). Individual and household poverty has been consistently shown as a risk factor for asthma and respiratory infections (WHO, 2012), coronary heart disease (Hart et.al.,1997), diabetes (Risteet. al. 2001) and homicide (Singh et al.; 2012)

Besides the traditional socioeconomic characteristics, in conjunction with the demographic ones, the set of potential socioeconomic determinants on health status lies beyond individual level effect. In recent years, an i...

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... premature mortality (Idler and Benyamini, 1997; van Doorslaer).

In spite of holding a set of advantages, SAH presents challenges in terms of empirical analysis. Being subjective, its assessment is based on different reference points (Groot, 2000). The so-called reporting bias implies that individuals belonging different socioeconomic and demographic groups may evaluate their own health differently even if their “true” health is similar. Nevertheless, in accordance with Nogueira (2008), we assume that the SAH´s subjectivity is not a limitation, but rather, a favorable feature for this sort of analysis. As just commented above, illness-health perceptions and experiences lived by the person are also a function of individuals and contextual circumstances, consequently better captured if the nature of the variable is indeed, more sensible to these social dimensions.