The association between income inequality and all-cause mortality across urban communities in Korea

BMC Public Health

Research Article

Mi-ah Han¹  Seong-Woo Choi¹  Jong Park¹  So-Yeon Ryu¹ 

[1] Department of Preventive Medicine, Chosun University Medical School, 309, Pilmun-daero, 501-759, Gwangju, Republic of Korea;

关键词: Income Inequality;    Gini Coefficient;    Urban Community;    Median Household Income;    Community Population;   

DOI  :  10.1186/s12889-015-1924-x

 received in 2015-02-11, accepted in 2015-06-10,  发布年份 2015

来源: Springer

【 摘 要 】

BackgroundKorea has achieved considerable economic growth more rapidly than most other countries, but disparities in income level have increased. Therefore, we sought to assess the association between income inequality and mortality across Korean cities.MethodsData on household income were obtained from the 2010-2012 Korean Community Health Survey and data on all-cause mortality and other covariates were obtained from the Korean Statistical Information Service. The Gini coefficient, Robin Hood index, and income share ratio between the 80th and 20th percentiles of the distribution were measured for each community. After excluding communities affected by changes in administrative districts between 2010 and 2012, a total of 157 communities and 172,398 urban residents were included in the analysis.ResultsWhen we graphed income inequality measures versus all-cause mortality as scatter plots, the R square values of the regression lines for GC, RHI, and 80/20 ratios relative to mortality were 0.230, 0.238, and 0.152, respectively. After adjusting for other covariates and median household income, mean all-cause mortality increased significantly with increasing GC (P for trend = 0.014) and RHI (P for trend = 0.031), and increased marginally with 80/20 ratio (P for trend = 0.067).ConclusionsOur data demonstrate that income inequality measures are significantly associated with all-cause mortality rate after adjustment for covariates, including median household income across urban communities in Korea.

【 授权许可】

Unknown   
© Park et al. 2015. This article is published under license to BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly credited. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.