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The Contributions of Diseases to Increasing Educational Mortality Differential in Austria

    Franz Schwarz

VID Working Papers, pp. 1-25, 2021/12/06

doi: 10.1553/0x003d0a77


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doi:10.1553/0x003d0a77

Abstract

This paper examines how much changing educational disparity for specific causes of deathcontributed to the change in overall educational mortality disparity between 1981/82 and1991/92 among Austrian adults aged 30–74 years. Besides specific causes of death, thestudy also examines educational differentials for both avoidable causes of death andmortality amenable to medical intervention. The data source is based on a one-yearmortality follow-up of the total Austrian census population. The data for the examinedpopulation is made up of individual records for people aged 30–74, totaling 3,805,208 for1981/82 and 4,064,184 for 1991/92, from which 34,218 and 29,443, respectively, were ondeceased persons. The study uses a new approach for decomposing the change in overallmortality differentials into contributions of specific causes to the change. For this purpose,it extends the regression-based Slope Index of Inequality. The findings suggest thateducational inequalities in overall mortality have widened significantly in Austria, butmore among men than among women. However, without the increase in the disparity forischemic heart disease, between 1981/82 and 1991/92, there would have been a decline inabsolute educational disparity in overall mortality among Austrian men and women. Alsostriking are the rising absolute and relative disparities for diabetes among females as wellas the increasing disparities for colorectal cancer and digestive diseases among men.Increasing differentials in avoidable mortality essentially contributed to increasededucational disparities in overall mortality. With regard to mortality amenable to medicaltreatment, the differentials increased considerably for men but not for women.

Keywords: Mortality, Socioeconomic Inequalities, Education, Relative Index of Inequality, Austria