This is thesis is about the research between income inequality and health in European countries. The aim of the research is to either prove or disprove a correlation where income inequality...Show moreThis is thesis is about the research between income inequality and health in European countries. The aim of the research is to either prove or disprove a correlation where income inequality influences health. That’s why the main question is: “To what extent does income inequality influence the degree of health in European countries?”. With a series of regressions among which a fixed regression for time and countries, 22 countries were tested over a time lapse from 2006 to 2015. Inspired by theories such as the one by Pop, van Oorschot and van Ingen (2012) and Detollenaere, Desmarest, Boeckxsteans & Willems (2018) the gap in the literature was filled by aiming to research the high-income countries. The results showed that for high-income countries, there was no significant correlation between income inequality and infant mortality. The correlations between income inequality and both life expectancy and self-perceived health status on the contrary, were significant. However, the results for these regressions showed that the direction of correlation was not as expected. The theory expected the health to deteriorate when the income inequality increase. The opposite was true for this specific dataset. A possibility for these results to come out is that only rich European countries made up the dataset. All of these countries have universal healthcare, so the health can maybe not even improve by adjusting something small in the economy. Further research is necessary to find out what these results could mean.Show less
