Aim Despite the country's explicit political goal to establish
equivalent living conditions across Germany, significant
inequality continues to exist. We argue that premature
mortality is an excellent proxy variable for testing
the claim of equivalent living conditions since the
root causes of premature death are socioeconomic.
Subject and methods We analyse variation in premature
mortality across Germany's 402 districts and cities in
2014.
Results Premature mortality spatially clusters among
geographically contiguous and proximate districts/cities
and is higher in more urban places as well as in
districts/cities located further north and in former East
Germany. We demonstrate that, first, socioeconomic factors
account for 62% of the cross-sectional variation in
years of potential life lost and 70% of the variation in
the premature mortality rate. Second, we show that
these socioeconomic factors either entirely or almost
fully eliminate the systematic spatial patterns that exist
in premature mortality.
Conclusion On its own, fiscal redistribution, the centrepiece
of how Germany aspires to establish its political goal, cannot
generate equivalent living conditions in the absence of a comprehensive
set of economic and social policies at all levels of
political administration, tackling the disparities in socioeconomic
factors that collectively result in highly unequal living
conditions.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:VIENNA/oai:epub.wu-wien.ac.at:6564 |
| Date | January 2018 |
| Creators | PlĂĽmper, Thomas, Neumayer, Eric, Laroze, Denise |
| Publisher | Springer |
| Source Sets | Wirtschaftsuniversität Wien |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Article, PeerReviewed |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | Creative Commons: Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) |
| Relation | https://doi.org/10.1007/s10389-017-0865-5, https://springer.com/, http://orcid.org/0000-0002-1461-0737, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10389-017-0893-1, http://epub.wu.ac.at/6564/ |
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