Preventable mortality, related socioeconomic, and cultural factors across European countries

Abstract

Preventable mortality is a societal burden, impacting significantly on a country’s economy. The aim of this study is to identify the factors associated with the preventable mortality rate across European countries. The major contribution of this study comes from the consideration of cultural values to be related with preventable mortality. The cultural values taken into consideration are uncertainty avoidance and long-term orientation which have a strong correlation with economic preferences. For this purpose, panel data from 27 countries was collected for the period 2011–2019. Various models were applied to the dataset, including least squares dummy variable regression, AR(1) model, as well as Driscoll-Kraay, Prais-Winstein, and Hausman-Taylor models. Results show that while preventable mortality rate across European countries closely correlates with GDP per capita, social security expenditures, and air pollution, it is also associated with immigrants per capita and health expenditures. The key findings point to the relationship between cultural values and preventable mortality. These results show that designing effective policies and measures to reduce preventable mortality need to account for the cultural traits of the population.