Social capital, life expectancy and mortality: a cross-national examination

Brendan Kennelly (), Eamon O'Shea and Eoghan Garvey

Social Science & Medicine, 2003, vol. 56, issue 12, 2367-2377

Abstract: This paper analyses the relationship between social capital and population health. The analysis is carried out within an econometric model of population health in 19 countries in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development countries using panel data covering three different time periods. Social capital is measured by the proportion of people who say that that they generally trust other people and by membership in voluntary associations. The model performs well in explaining health outcomes. We find very little statistically significant evidence that the standard indicators of social capital have a positive effect on population health. By contrast, per capita income and the proportion of health expenditure financed by the government are both significantly and positively associated with better health outcomes. The paper casts doubt upon the widely accepted hypothesis that social capital has a positive effect on health and illustrates the importance of testing this kind of hypothesis in an extended model.

Keywords: Population; health; Social; capital; Income; inequality; Econometric; model; Per-capita; GDP; Public; health; expenditure (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2003
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (69)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0277-9536(02)00241-1
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

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:eee:socmed:v:56:y:2003:i:12:p:2367-2377

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/supportfaq.cws_home/regional
http://www.elsevier. ... _01_ooc_1&version=01

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
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().