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THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN THE HEALTH STATUS AND ECONOMIC SITUATION IN THE EU MEMBER STATES
Abstract
The main aim of the article is to discover whether there is a relationship between the self-reported health status presented in the EU Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (EU SILC) and between the economic situations in the EU Member States. Although people?s assessment of their heath is subjective, we suggest that there exists a statistically significant relationship between the answers to the health status question in EU SILC questionnaire: “How is your health in general?” and the living standard in the EU countries. A majority of the adult population perceives their health as good or very good. In Ireland and Sweden more than 80 % of adults assessed their health as good or better in 2012, at the EU-28 level the same statistics reached 69 %, while in Lithuania it was only 44.8 %. According to the ranking of EU countries by gross domestic product (GDP) per capita in purchasing power standards (PPS) it is clear that the top of the list with the highest values of GDP was composed by the “old” EU Member States. The GDP per capita in PPS is an indicator of country?s economic performance and an indicator of standard of living as well. The rank correlation measures (for example Spearman Correlation Coefficient) show a strong and positive correlation between the rank of countries by the percentage of adults perceived their health as good or very good and the rank of EU Member States according the gross domestic product per capita in purchasing power standards. It means that adults in countries with a higher living standard perceived their health as good or very good more often than in countries with a lower levels of GDP per capita (in PPS). As a real convergence of the new Member States is expected in future, the increase in living standard should be correlated with an increase of the percentage of population that perceives their health as good or very good.
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References12
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