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Income Inequality and Individual Health: An Empirical Analysis of the 2005 Chinese General Social Survey

*Author 1: ZHOU Bin, Organization Department of CPC，Changzhou Municipal Committee，Jiangsu Province； Author 2: QI Yaqiang,Department of Sociology, Renmin University of China     

  1. *Author 1: ZHOU Bin, Organization Department of CPC，Changzhou Municipal Committee，Jiangsu Province； Author 2: QI Yaqiang,Department of Sociology, Renmin University of China  
  • Online:2012-09-20 Published:2012-09-20
  • Contact: Author 2: QI Yaqiang,Department of Sociology, Renmin University of China E-mail:qiyaqiang@ruc.edu.cn
  • About author:*Author 1: ZHOU Bin, Organization Department of CPC，Changzhou Municipal Committee，Jiangsu Province； Author 2: QI Yaqiang,Department of Sociology, Renmin University of China
  • Supported by:

    The research is supported by the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities, and the Research Funds of Renmin University of China (10XNF024).

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Abstract:

Health is not only one of the ultimate goals of human development, but also a key element of human capital. Health plays significant roles in determining individual’s life quality and facilitating social development. With the general improvement of people’s living standards in the past several decades in China, health issues have attracted more and more attention from social researchers and policy makers. Although China has sustained rapid economic growth in recent years, the problem of social inequality has aggravated and the income gap between the rich and the poor has widened substantially. To date, empirical investigation of the impact of income inequality on health in China is still very limited. In contrast, more and more studies in other countries since the 1970’s have suggested that income inequality is negatively associated with population health at the aggregate level. Two competing hypotheses have been proposed to explain the relationship between income inequality and population health. One is the absolute income hypothesis, which claims that the aggregate relationship between income inequality and population health is an instance of ecological fallacy and that it simply reflects the nonlinear effect of individual income on health; the other is the income inequality hypothesis, which insists that income inequality have a genuine, detrimental effect on individual health, proposing psychosocial and neomaterialist mechanisms for the harm of income inequality to individual health. In this study, drawing data from the 2005 Chinese General Social Survey (CGSS2005) and countylevel social statistics, we examined the relationships between individual income, county income inequality and individual health in China, and systematically tested the absolute income hypothesis and the income inequality hypothesis empirically. Although the results showed the existence of marginally diminishing returns in the effects of income on health, the urbantorural income ratio at the county level was still negatively associated with individual selfrated general health even after controlling for the concave effect of the absolute income on health. This finding empirically supported the income inequality hypothesis, evidencing that income inequality did pollute individual health independently. We further explored the potential mechanisms through which income inequality affected individual health, and tested the explanatory power of the social psychological mechanism and the neomaterialist mechanism, respectively. The results gave some support to the former in partially accounting for the negative association of income inequality to individual health but not for the latter.

Key words: income inequality,, selfrated general health, , absolute income hypothesis, , income inequality hypothesis