Regional inequalities in premature mortality in Great Britain

Plümper, Thomas, Laroze, Denise and Neumayer, Eric ORCID: 0000-0003-2719-7563 (2018) Regional inequalities in premature mortality in Great Britain. PLOS ONE, 13 (2). e0193488. ISSN 1932-6203

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Abstract

Premature mortality exhibits strong spatial patterns in Great Britain. Local authorities that are located further North and West, that are more distant from its political centre London and that are more urban tend to have a higher premature mortality rate. Premature mortality also tends to cluster among geographically contiguous and proximate local authorities. We develop a novel analytical research design that relies on spatial pattern recognition to demonstrate that an empirical model that contains only socio-economic variables can eliminate these spatial patterns almost entirely. We demonstrate that socioeconomic factors across local authority districts explain 81 percent of variation in female and 86 percent of variation in male premature mortality in 2012–14. As our findings suggest, policy-makers cannot hope that health policies alone suffice to significantly reduce inequalities in health. Rather, it requires strong efforts to reduce the inequalities in socio-economic factors, or living conditions for short, in order to overcome the spatial disparities in health, of which premature mortality is a clear indication.

Item Type:	Article
Official URL:	http://journals.plos.org/plosone/
Additional Information:	© 2018 The Authors
Divisions:	Geography & Environment
Subjects:	H Social Sciences > HC Economic History and Conditions H Social Sciences > HN Social history and conditions. Social problems. Social reform
Date Deposited:	20 Mar 2018 15:31
Last Modified:	18 Apr 2024 07:33
URI:	http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/id/eprint/87311

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