Does governance matter for aggregate health capital?

The point of departure of our analysis is the seminal work of Rodgers (1979) on the absolute and relative income hypotheses. We find that substituting the governance index for the Gini index is statistically the preferred regression model. Our findings lend support to the argument that governance matters. Further investigation provides evidence for two types of threshold effects: in terms of both absolute income and governance. For those countries below a threshold, absolute income is the most significant determinant of health, while for those above it, governance matters the most. The regression analyses are conducted on a sample of 112 states, which is representative of a wide range of absolute income and governance levels.

Is low self-esteem an inevitable consequence of stigma? An example from women with chronic mental health problems

It is often assumed that membership in a stigmatized group has negative consequences for the self-concept. However, this relationship is neither straightforward nor inevitable, and there is evidence suggesting that negative consequences may not necessarily occur (Psychol. Rev. 96(4) (1989) 608). This paper argues that the relationship has not been sufficiently theorized, and that a more detailed analysis is called for in order to understand the relationship between stigma and the self. The paper presents a critical examination of modified labeling theory (Am. Sociol. Rev. 52 (1987) 96), with examples from a study examining perceptions of stigma and their relationship to self-evaluation in women with chronic mental health problems. Open-ended interviews and qualitative analyses were used in preference to global measures of self-esteem. It was found that although the women were aware of society's unfavorable representations of mental illness, and the effects this had on their lives, they did not accept these representations as valid and therefore rejected them as applicable to the self. The participants did not deny their mental health problems, but their acceptance of labels was critical and pragmatic. Labels were rejected when they were perceived as carrying an unrealistic and negative stereotype, or when the women felt that their symptoms did not fit with the diagnostic criteria. The research illustrates the importance of considering people's subjective understandings of stigmatized conditions and societal reactions in order to understand the relation between stigma and the self. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.

Social capital at work as a predictor of employee health: Multilevel evidence from work units in Finland

The majority of previous research on social capital and health is limited to social capital in residential neighborhoods and communities. Using data from the Finnish 10-Town study we examined social capital at work as a predictor of health in a cohort of 9524 initially healthy local government employees in 1522 work units, who did not change their work unit between 2000 and 2004 and responded to surveys measuring social capital at work and health at both time-points. We used a validated tool to measure social capital with perceptions at the individual level and with co-workers' responses at the work unit level. According to multilevel modeling, a contextual effect of work unit social capital on self-rated health was not accounted for by the individual's socio-demographic characteristics or lifestyle. The odds for health impairment were 1.27 times higher for employees who constantly worked in units with low social capital than for those with constantly high work unit social capital. Corresponding odds ratios for low and declining individual-level social capital varied between 1.56 and 1.78. Increasing levels of individual social capital were associated with sustained good health. In conclusion, this longitudinal multilevel study provides support for the hypothesis that exposure to low social capital at work may be detrimental to the health of employees. (c) 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Strategies for Effective Management of Health and Safety in Confined Site Construction

The overall aim of this research is to identify and catalogue the numerous managerial strategies for effective management of health and safety on a confined, urban, construction site. A mixed methods methodology was adopted using interviews and focus group discussions on three selected case studies of confined construction sites. In addition to these, a questionnaire survey was used based on the findings from the interviews and the focus group discussions. The top five key strategies include (1) Employ safe system of work plans to mitigate personnel health and safety issues; (2) Inform personnel, before starting on-site, of the potential issues using site inductions; (3) Effective communication among site personnel; (4) Draft and implement an effective design site layout prior to starting on-site; and (5) Use of banksman (traffic co-ordinator) to segregate personnel from vehicular traffic. The construction sector is one of the leading industries in accident causation and with the continued development and regeneration of our urban centres, confined site construction is quickly becoming the norm - an environment which only fuels accident creation within the construction sector. This research aids on-site management that requires direction and assistance in the identification and implementation of key strategies for the management of health and safety, particularly in confined construction site environments.

Physical Stature Decline and the Health Status of the Elderly Population in England

Few research papers in economics have examined the extent, causes or consequences of physical stature decline in aging populations. Using repeated observations on objectively measured data from the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing (ELSA), we document that reduction in height is an important phenomenon among respondents aged 50 and over. On average, physical stature decline occurs at an annual rate of between 0.08% and 0.10% for males, and 0.12% and 0.14% for females—which approximately translates into a 2cm to 4cm reduction in height over the life course. Since height is commonly used as a measure of long-run health, our results demonstrate that failing to take age-related height loss into account substantially overstates the health advantage of younger birth cohorts relative to their older counterparts. We also show that there is an absence of consistent predictors of physical stature decline at the individual level. However, we demonstrate how deteriorating health and reductions in height occur simultaneously. We document that declines in muscle mass and bone density are likely to be the mechanism through which these effects are operating. If this physical stature decline is determined by deteriorating health in adulthood, the coefficient on measured height when used as an input in a typical empirical health production function will be affected by reverse causality. While our analysis details the inherent difficulties associated with measuring height in older populations, we do not find that significant bias arises in typical empirical health production functions from the use of height which has not been adjusted for physical stature decline. Therefore, our results validate the use of height among the population aged over 50.

Education, gender, and state-level disparities in the health of older Indians: Evidence from biomarker data

Using new biomarker data from the 2010 pilot round of the Longitudinal Aging Study in India (LASI), we investigate education, gender, and state-level disparities in health. We find that hemoglobin level, a marker for anemia, is lower for respondents with no schooling (0.7 g/dL less in the adjusted model) compared to those with some formal education and is also lower for females than for males (2.0 g/dL less in the adjusted model). In addition, we find that about one third of respondents in our sample aged 45 or older have high C-reaction protein (CRP) levels (>3 mg/L), an indicator of inflammation and a risk factor for cardiovascular disease. We find no evidence of educational or gender differences in CRP, but there are significant state-level disparities, with Kerala residents exhibiting the lowest CRP levels (a mean of 1.96 mg/L compared to 3.28 mg/L in Rajasthan, the state with the highest CRP). We use the Blinder–Oaxaca decomposition approach to explain group-level differences, and find that state-level disparities in CRP are mainly due to heterogeneity in the association of the observed characteristics of respondents with CRP, rather than differences in the distribution of endowments across the sampled state populations.

Comparing the relationship between stature and later life health in six low and middle income countries

This paper examines the relationship between stature and later life health in 6 emerging economies, each of which are expected to experience significant increases in the mean age of their populations over the coming decades. Using data from the WHO Study on Global Ageing and Adult Health (SAGE) and pilot data from the Longitudinal Ageing Study in India (LASI), I show that various measures of health are associated with height, a commonly used proxy for childhood environment. In the pooled sample, a 10 cm increase in height is associated with between a 2 and 3 percentage point increase in the probability of being in very good or good self-reported health, a 3 percentage point increase in the probability of reporting no difficulties with activities of daily living or instrumental activities of daily living, and between a fifth and a quarter of a standard deviation increase in grip strength and lung function. Adopting a methodology previously used in the research on inequality, I also summarise the height-grip strength gradient for each country using the concentration index, and provide a decomposition analysis.