oa De gezondheidskloof tussen lager en hoger opgeleiden - Verschillen tussen landen verklaard door overheidsuitgaven in de gezondheidszorg en arbeidsmarktomstandigheden

Cross-national variation in the educational health gap explained by governmental health expenditure and labour market characteristics.

Previous research shows that even though the lower educated run a relatively high risk to be in poor health, there is ample cross-national variation in the disparity between educational groups in having poor health. Explanations for these differences between countries are, however, rather scarce. We set out to address this lacuna by investigating the extent to which cross-national variation in the health gap between the lower and higher educated in Europe can be explained by a country’s governmental health expenditures and cyclical and structural labour market conditions. We used information from the European Social Surveys 2002-2008 on approximately 91000 individuals in 32 European nations, and estimated random slope multilevel models with cross-level interactions to empirically test our hypotheses. We find that the health gap between the lower educated and the higher educated is smaller in countries with higher levels of governmental health expenditure, and with a highly modernized labour market.