Explaining differences in education-related inequalities in health between urban and rural areas in Mongolia

Type Journal Article - International journal for equity in health
Title Explaining differences in education-related inequalities in health between urban and rural areas in Mongolia
Author(s)
Volume 14
Issue 1
Publication (Day/Month/Year) 2015
URL https://equityhealthj.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12939-015-0281-9
Abstract
Background
After the socioeconomic transition in 1990, Mongolia has been experiencing demographic and epidemiologic transitions; however, there is lack of evidence on socioeconomic-related inequality in health across the country. The aim of this paper is to evaluate the education-related inequalities in adult population health in urban and rural areas of Mongolia in 2007/2008.

Methods
This paper used a nationwide cross-sectional data, the Household Socio-Economic Survey 2007/2008, collected by the National Statistical Office. We employed the Erreygers’ concentration index to assess the degree of education-related inequality in adult health in urban and rural areas.

Results
Our results suggest that a lower education level was associated with poor self-reported health. The concentration indices of physical limitation and chronic disease were significantly less than zero in both areas. On the other hand, ill-health was concentrated among the less educated groups.

The decomposition results show education, economic activity status and income were the main contributors to education-related inequalities in physical limitation and chronic disease removing age-sex related contributions.

Conclusions
Improving accessibility and quality of education, especially for the lower socioeconomic groups may reduce socioeconomic-related inequality in health in both rural and urban areas of Mongolia.

Related studies

»
»