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The European Journal of Public Health Advance Access originally published online on July 8, 2009
The European Journal of Public Health 2009 19(5):452-453; doi:10.1093/eurpub/ckp103
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© The Author 2009. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the European Public Health Association. All rights reserved.

Commentaries

Causality, social selectivity or artefacts? Why socioeconomic inequalities in health are not smallest in the Nordic countries

Tim Huijts1 and Terje Andreas Eikemo2,3

1 Department of Sociology, Radboud University Nijmegen, Nijmegen, The Netherlands
2 SINTEF Health Research, Trondheim, Norway
3 Department of Public Health, Erasmus MC, Rotterdam, The Netherlands

Correspondence: Tim Huijts, Department of Sociology, Radboud University Nijmegen, P.O. Box 9104 6500 HE Nijmegen, The Netherlands, tel: +31 243612042, fax: +31 243612399, e-mail: t.huijts@maw.ru.nl

Received May 7, 2009, accepted June 18, 2009

Keywords: Europe, health, Nordic countries, socioeconomic position

The first 10% of the full text of this article appears below.

The Nordic welfare states aim at providing equality of the highest standards for all their citizens. However, numerous studies have demonstrated that socioeconomic inequalities in morbidity and mortality are not among the smallest in these countries as compared with other European regions.1–7 Recently, this has spurred health researchers to evaluate the extent to which the Nordic welfare regime is capable of diminishing socioeconomic health inequalities.8,9 After all, the conclusion that the Nordic welfare regime does not succeed in reducing health inequalities would have serious implications for health policy world wide. In this commentary, we aim at evaluating why the Nordic welfare regime does not completely succeed in reducing socioeconomic inequalities in health, despite its egalitarian nature. Our presentation is divided into three types of explanations: causality, social selectivity . . . [Full Text of this Article]


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