THE ROLE OF HEALTH STATUS AT SHAPING INEQUALITIES IN WELL-BEING OF THE BABY BOOMERS AND OLDER PERSONS IN EUROPE

摘要

The promotion of well-being and the reduction in inequalities in well-being are viewed as ways to improve social cohesion in Europe. There is little evidence of the level of inequalities in subjective well-being (SWB) among the 50+ population and what may explain these inequalities. This study estimates the overall inequalities in SWB in fourteen different European countries, using a variant of the Gini index. Then, the inequalities are decomposed to document the extent to which health contributes to them. The analysis is conducted on four waves of the ‘Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe’ (SHARE) that cover 2006 to 2015. All countries display statistically significant inequalities in SWB. The Northern and small Central European countries have the lowest inequalities (The Netherlands with Gini=0.20, followed by Denmark, Belgium, Switzerland, Sweden), while Eastern Europe has the largest ones (The Czech Republic, Poland, and Estonia with Gini=0.51). The decomposition reveals that health largely contributes to the inequalities in SWB in all countries. The smallest contribution of health is found in Denmark, where it explains 4.1% of the inequalities in SWB. In contrast in Italy, health contributes to 17.1% of these inequalities. The countries with the largest inequalities in SWB tend to have the relative largest contributions of health to these inequalities. These results indicate that policies promoting health of the most vulnerable 50+ groups would reduce inequalities in SBW the most in the countries that need it the most as well, i.e. countries with the largest inequalities.