Economic growth, income inequality and life expectancy in China.

China had made dramatic health gains before its economic reform that began in 1978 produced rapid economic growth in the ensuing years. Since the economic reform, China's income inequality has substantially increased, and health gains have stagnated. This article investigates the extent to which China's health stagnation may be attributable to the rise in income inequality in China. By simulating the improvement in life expectancy that could have resulted if, ceteris paribus, income inequality had stayed constant at the lowest level after the founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949, we find that the sharply increasing income inequality in China has contributed to life loss in China's population, about 0.6 years for men and 0.4 years for women. These findings suggest that redistribution of income from rich to poor may be one of the most important policy levers for improving population health in China.

Socio-economic disparities in mortality among the elderly in China.

This longitudinal study of mortality among the elderly (65 and over) in China used a large representative sample to examine the association between mortality and three different socio-economic status (SES) indicators-education, economic independence, and household income per head. The results, while varying depending on the measures used, show that there is strong evidence of a negative association between SES and overall mortality. A cause-specific analysis shows that SES is more strongly related to the reduction of mortality from more preventable causes, such as circulatory disease and respiratory disease, than from less preventable causes such as cancer. We also investigated the effects of three sets of factors that may mediate the observed SES-mortality relationship: support networks, health-related behaviours, and access to health care. The results show that for both overall and cause-specific mortality, access to health care is the most important of the three.