Health as if everybody counted blog

The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) is a group of high-income (and some middle-income) countries that historically has paid attention mainly to conventional economic indicators such as growth, productivity and innovation. It does other things as well, including providing some of the best statistical overviews and assessments of its members' foreign aid performance. And recently, it has been addressing the consequences of increasing economic inequality within the borders of many of its members.

Ermenegildo Zegna Boutique in Chile, one of the OECD’s most unequal countriesA December 2011 OECD report provides a description of those increases, an analyses of their causes, and country-by-country data that have some sobering implications for Canada. The report finds that income inequality increased in most OECD countries over the past three decades, although the level of inequality varies widely. The average income (adjusted for household size) of the richest 10 percent of the population is 5 or 6 times the average income of the poorest 10 percent in the Nordic countries, but 10 times that of the poorest in Canada, 14 to 1 in the United States, and 27 to 1 in Mexico and Chile. The report identifies a number of contributors to rising inequality of market incomes, including several aspects of globalization; technological change (which to the authors' credit it describes as hard to disentangle from globalization); changes in hours worked, which have favoured higher earners; and changes in household structure.

There is much room for debate here, notably about the role of globalization and the reasons for rising labour market incomes at the top of the income distribution, which have played a major role in increasing inequality, but also about the OECD's view that inequality can be reduced through raising workers' educational levels. This is worth doing, but effects on inequality are likely to be offset by growth in the kinds of work susceptible to 'offshoring'. For policy purposes, a point of particular interest is how taxes and benefit systems change the distribution of income, and how their effect varies across countries and over time. Like earlier analyses, the report points out that taxes and benefits in some countries (many in Continental Europe) are more strongly redistributive than in others (like the United States and Chile). Generically: "Until the mid-1990s, tax-benefit systems in many OECD countries offset more than half of the rise in market-income inequality. However, while market-income inequality continued to rise after the mid-1990s, much of the stabilizing effect of taxes and benefits on household income inequality declined."

The country note for Canada points out that the share of all income flowing to the richest 1% of Canadians grew from 8.1% in 1980 to 13.3% in 2007 – a trend that closely parallels an even more extreme pattern in the United States, where the income share of the top 1% is now higher than at any point since the Great Depression. (Readers interested in exploring comparative trends in top incomes may want to explore the World Top Incomes Database.) The OECD also points to the declining redistributive effect of Canadian taxes and transfers – a point made a few years ago in a Statistics Canada study, which observed: "Redistribution grew enough in the 1980s to offset 130% of the growth in family market-income inequality -- more than enough to keep after-tax income inequality stable. However, in the 1990-to-2004 period, redistribution did not grow at the same pace as market-income inequality and offset only 19% of the increase in family market-income inequality." The OECD note identifies a somewhat less dramatic retreat from redistribution, reflecting the fact that many ways of doing such calculations exist - for example, the OECD study restricted its analysis to the population aged 15-64 - but the general trend is clear.

Why should population health researchers be concerned with rising economic inequality? There are several reasons, most of which are familiar. First, rising inequality may lead to increases in poverty, however it is defined, although that is not necessarily the case. Second, socioeconomic gradients in health usually exist across the entire income spectrum. Intuitively, we would expect these gradients to be steeper when economic gradients are also steeper, other things being equal, although this is a difficult proposition to test because of the impact of policies that do not directly affect income distribution. Third, income inequality is only part of the story: wealth inequality, which the OECD study did not address, is normally greater than income inequality, and insecure and precarious jobs (which have their own health implications, including higher exposure to on-the-job hazards) are concentrated at the bottom of the income scale. Fourth, it is argued – notably by Richard Wilkinson and colleagues – that higher levels of economic inequality within a society lead to overall lower levels of health, although the mechanisms of action remain unclear.

Photo by Paul Keller, reproduced under a Creative Commons LicenceA final reason has received less attention in the context of health policy; it involves a phenomenon that former US Cabinet secretary Robert Reich called the "secession of the successful". Past a certain high level of income and wealth, people need less from government, and different things. As one Arizonan interviewed for an article on politics in that state put it: "People who have swimming pools don't need state parks. If you buy your books at Borders you don't need libraries. If your kids are in private school, you don't need K-12. The people here, or at least those who vote, don't see the need for government." To which we could add: people who can afford to drive or fly everywhere don't need public transportation; people with secure incomes gain little from public financing of social or subsidized housing; people who could afford private insurance may resist paying taxes to keep a public health insurance system afloat for the less healthy and less wealthy; and so on.

What happens to the political prospects for reducing health inequity by way of social policy when a small but highly influential segment of the population needs government mainly for roads, police and prisons – and perhaps regards enhancing its own security through private purchases as routine? I recently returned from a workshop in Johannesburg, one of several South African cities that are more economically unequal than any other developing world cities included in United Nations Human Settlements Programme study (p. 73). The workshop was held in a guest house with an electronically activated gate, in a suburb where many properties were fenced with razor wire, and almost every one boasted a private security service's "armed response" sign. This is commonplace in South African cities. From Arizona to South Africa, does the interaction of inequality and privatization suggest a self-reinforcing process that can only be reversed through internal revolt or catastrophic external events (think the Great Depression and the second World War)? Health economist Robert Evans, quoted in a previous posting, wonders: "If we are back to a pre-war income distribution, how much of our post-war social policies can survive?" We should pay more attention to this question.

¹The Gini coefficient, a standard measure of income inequality, in Johannesburg is 0.75 according to this study – more unequal than the national distribution of income in any country in the world. By comparison the Gini coefficients in Mexico and Chile, the two most unequal countries in the OECD, were 0.494 and 0.476 in the late 2000s, according to the OECD.