Household income

Studies examining the relationship between socioeconomic status and health have also been carried out comparing various US states, e.g. comparing the degree of household income inequality and state-level variation in all-cause and cause-specific mortality. In an independent study, Kaplan et al. (1996a) examined the association between income inequality and state-level and household-level variations in total mortality rates. In all cases, increased steepness of inequality was associated with higher death rates overall. 

D17. Finally, what was your total household income in 2000 That is, income for all members of your household during 2000. Was it... (READ LIST) ... 

Table 9.10 shows the distribution of U.S. household incomes, which limits what each household can afford to buy. Let us consider baby diapers. A mother has a number of options to consider cloth diapers delivered to the home and retrieved after use, cloth diapers that are home laundered, disposable paper diapers for the garbage can after use, and the rural poor may let the babies run around with bare bottoms. The poor families buy less goods, and need to concentrate purchases on housing and basic food, such as bread and potatoes. The expenditure of 456 for disposal diapers in a budget of 75,000 is 0.6%, which is not a serious problem but for families with less than 10,000 income per year, this sum becomes 4.5%, which represents a much bigger burden, and less expensive and affordable options would be chosen. 

Table 9.17 shows the U.S. household vehicle expenses in 1988, arranged by household income. It is seen that, as the household income increases from below 10,000 to above 75,000, the gallons purchased per household more than doubled, from 650 to 1400 gallons/year, but the burden of the fuel purchase as a percentage of household income drops from 8.4 to 1.6%. The income elasticity can be computed to be... 

Table 13.3. Regression results with mean household income and time trends...

Parallel to the advance of pharmaceutical innovation, other determinants of health outcome may also change over time, such as income level and personal health care expenditures on other types of care. Because of the limitation of data sources, we are unable to construct the disease-specific data for health care expenditure and income. Rather, we use the average annual household income and time trend to control the influence of social and economic factors on health outcome. For simplicity, we assume that the health effect of pharmaceutical innovation occurs without lag when we extend our regression to include other explanatory variables. 

Regression Results with Mean Household Income and Time Trends... 

During the 1980s. the cost of attending college rose three times faster than the median household income. 

Scenario GreenJeans Software sells computer programs to track household income and expenses. The company is looking to grow its market share, and wants to explore the feasibility of offering its service via the Internet. While most team members are in favor of this idea, they need to convince upper management that the service can be offered securely, and that it can be reliably supported with minimal restructuring. 

The demographic information for experts gathered in these studies has included the highest academic degree earned, fields of study, age, sex, race, health, organizational affiliation, and current position at work. The demographic information for the lay public gathered as part of the studies has included education, age, sex, marital status, race, children, health, present employment status, career, and annual household income. 

It is important to point out that this increase is household income does not mean automatically an increased capacity for women to decide its allocation between the different expenses. Women generally only control income with male permission, which may be withdrawn. Women s own cash earnings are often incorporated into these existing patterns of resource allocation rather than radically transforming them. Although women may control some of their own earned income, this is widely variable between cultures, within cultures between different social groups, and even between households within the same family (Taub, 1998, UNHCR, 2007). 

Given the unequal patterns of intra-household income decisions, increases in women s income from taking part in GMCL activity may merely substitute for male expenditure on family needs, freeing more male income for their own personal luxury expenditure. 

Questions 8, 9, 16 and 23 of the questiomiaire (see Appendix 2) of this chapter on whether the person regularly contrihutes to household income, does grocery shopping and has knowledge of current household outgoings for mineral water and water rates were therefore included to assist in interpreting the reliability of answers given and to hotter imderstand the robustness of the respondent s terms of reference. 

Certain relationships were explored to assess sample representativity. Positive correlations were found between per capita income (i.e. total household income divided hy number of occupants) and (1) education or (2) mineral water expenditure (also on a per capita basis), which was to be expected. The relationships between whether respondents drink tap water, their opinion of tap water and mineral water consumption were studied in detail, in order to better understand the motivations underlying statedWT P. 

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