EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Determinants of Health Disparities in Italian Regions

Luisa Franzini and Margherita Giannoni ()

No 70/2009, Quaderni del Dipartimento di Economia, Finanza e Statistica from Università di Perugia, Dipartimento Economia

Abstract: There is an extensive literature on regional disparities in health, but much of thisliterature focuses on the United States. Among European countries, Italy is the country whereregional health disparities contribute the most to socioeconomic health disparities. In this paper,we report on regional differences in self-reported poor health and explore possible determinantsat the individual and regional levels in Italy. We use data from the “Indagine Multiscopo sulle Famiglie”, a survey of aspects ofeveryday life in the Italian population, to estimate multilevel logistic regressions that model poorself-reported health as a function of individual and regional socioeconomic factors. Next we usethe causal step approach to test if living conditions, healthcare characteristics, social isolation,2and health behaviors at the regional level mediate the relationship between regionalsocioeconomic factors and self-rated health. We find that residents living in regions with more poverty, more unemployment, andmore income inequality are more likely to report poor health and that poor living conditions andprivate share of healthcare expenditures at the regional level are determinants of socioeconomicdisparities in self-rated health among Italian regions. The implications are that regional contexts matter and that regional policies in Italyhave the potential to reduce health disparities by implementing interventions aimed at improvingliving conditions and access to quality healthcare.

Keywords: health inequality; Italy; self-reported health; regional health disparities (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D10 I10 I12 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 25 pages
Date: 2009-10-20
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-geo, nep-hap, nep-hea and nep-ltv
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (15)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www2.ec.unipg.it/quaderni/qd70web.pdf (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 500 Can't connect to www2.ec.unipg.it:80 (A connection attempt failed because the connected party did not properly respond after a period of time, or established connection failed because connected host has failed to respond.)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pia:wpaper:70/2009

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Quaderni del Dipartimento di Economia, Finanza e Statistica from Università di Perugia, Dipartimento Economia Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Ubaldo Pizzoli ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-19
Handle: RePEc:pia:wpaper:70/2009