查看文章

Despite a concerted policy effort in Europe, social inequalities in health are a persistent problem. Developing a standardised measure of socioeconomic level across Europe will improve the understanding of the underlying mechanisms and causes of inequalities. This will facilitate developing, implementing and assessing new and more effective policies, and will improve the comparability and reproducibility of health inequality studies among countries. This paper presents the extension of the European Deprivation Index (EDI), a standardised measure first developed in France, to four other European countries—Italy, Portugal, Spain and England, using available 2001 and 1999 national census data.

The method previously tested and validated to construct the French EDI was used: first, an individual indicator for relative deprivation was constructed, defined by the minimal number of …