 Health inequalities in Eastern Europe. Does the role of the welfare regime differ from Western Europe?Regina Jutz Social Science & Medicine, 2020, vol. 267, issue C Abstract: When we study the impact of social policy on health inequalities, we find that most research is based on Western European countries. This study expands the geographical focus by including post-communist countries from Eastern Europe, Russia, and the Caucasus. The 2008/2009 round of the European Values Study (EVS) provides a unique opportunity for this analysis since it covers 23 post-communist countries and 20 Western European countries. The study uses multilevel cross-sectional analyses to examine the moderating role of welfare regimes on socioeconomic health inequalities. Many reviews claim that the results for welfare systems and health inequalities are inconsistent. However, since the studies selected for the reviews are mainly focused on Western Europe—only a few include Central Eastern European countries—we still need to find out how welfare regimes in post-communist countries moderate the link between socioeconomic status and health. A cluster analysis based on 13 social and economic indicators generates 4 welfare clusters within the post-communist countries which are used for further analyses. Regarding the achievements of the communist countries in compulsory secondary education, the expectation is that the educational health inequalities differ between Eastern and Western Europe. The multilevel analyses confirm that social gradients in health related to education and income exist in both Western and Eastern Europe. However, while income-related health inequalities are similar, educational health inequalities are most pronounced in the welfare cluster of the EU Member States of Central and Eastern Europe. Keywords: Health inequalities; Welfare states; Post-communist countries; Europe; Welfare regime typology; Cluster analysis; Multilevel analysis (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:socmed:v:267:y:2020:i:c:s0277953620305761 Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from DOI: 10.1016/j.socscimed.2020.113357 Access Statistics for this article Social Science & Medicine is currently edited by Ichiro (I.) Kawachi and S.V. (S.V.) Subramanian More articles in Social Science & Medicine from Elsevier |
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