Income inequality and health: an overview of empirical analyses in Japan

Abstract

The association between regional income inequality and individual health or self-rated health has been a key research issue in social epidemiology. A numerous number of multilevel analyses have been exploring it by explicitly considering both individual- and regional-level factors. In recent years, empirical studies on this topic have started to accumulate in Japan, where data availability is limited in general but income inequality has been widening remarkably.
This short essay presents a brief survey on previous studies in Japan and discusses issues to be addressed in terms of data and methodology. It also provides the key results from the author’s recent papers: Oshio and Kobayashi (2009a) (2009b), which indicate that regional income inequality adversely affects individual assessments of health in Japan.