Abstract
Research in public health, epidemiology, and medical sociology has debated the health impacts of income inequality. A common hypothesis is that socioeconomic contexts in neighborhoods, regions, or entire nation states shape individuals’ health and inequalities in health. Several reviews have concluded that the distribution of income within a society contributes to poor health. More recent research has focused on welfare state arrangements and their relevance to cross-national variations in health and inequalities in health. We argue that the welfare state determines and mediates the extent of inequalities in health through healthcare, social policy and public health. Many studies have been published in the last decade that have tried to examine the role played by these influences on health and health inequalities. This review will (1) summarize the extant research on the association between welfare state factors and health outcomes, (2) discuss how research theorizes the role of welfare state characteristics for between- and within-country differences in health, (3) present different approaches to empirically investigate the association between welfare state, health and inequalities in health, and (4) provide methodological considerations in this field of research.
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