Social capital and health: Does egalitarianism matter? A literature review

Table 1 Classification of countries by income distribution and public social expenditure, and summary of results

Country^¥	Gini coefficient^†	Public social expenditure in % of GDP^Φ	Single level study				Multilevel study
			Total number of studies	Strong association	Weak association	No association	Total number of studies	Fixed effects results	Random effects results
Egalitarian			8	6	2	0	2	2
Finland	26.1	29.00	3	2	1	0	No study	-	-
Norway	26.1	25.31	1	0	1	0	No study	-	-
Sweden	24.3	32.08	3	3	0	0	1	Significant association	ICC = 0.0%
Netherlands	25.1	25.20	No study	-	-	-	1	Significant association	ICC not reported
Germany	27.7	26.70	1	1	0	0	No study	-	-
Moderately egalitarian			10	6	3	1	2	2
Australia	30.5	16.99	3	1	2	0	No study	-	--
Canada	30.1	19.28	3	1	1	1	1	Significant association	ICC = 2.1%
Ireland	30.4	17.52	1	1	0	0	No study	-	-
Hungary	29.3	20.31	2	2	0	0	No study	-	-
UK	32.6	22.06	1	1	0	0	1	No conclusive evidence	ICC not reported
Not egalitarian			8	7	0	1	7	7
Russia^£	45.0	17.60	2	2	0	0	No study	-	-
USA	35.7	14.77	6	5	0	1	7	All studies show significant association	One study report ICC = 7.51%

Note:^¥There were few studies not based on a single country but considered a group of countries (e.g. 19 OECD countries or 49 different countries from all over the world). These studies used country-level social capital measures. Therefore, we did not include these in Table 1 as these studies contain countries with all three categorization of egalitarianism. Within this cross-country category two single level studies used independent sample (for Norway and Germany) and one multilevel study based on the Netherlands. In this table we considered them as a single country study and reported accordingly.
^† Disposable income used for every country other than the UK (for most recent years around 2000). For the UK, household expenditure was used in estimating Gini-coefficient [See, footnote 12 of 21]. These Gini-coefficients are also comparable with the Luxembourg Income Study [See 20, Table 1].
^Φ OECD (2004), Social expenditure data base (SOCX, http://www.oecd.org/els/social/expenditure)[21]. Numbers are average value of the years 1990–2001 except for Hungary and Russia. ^£ For Russia, Gini-coefficient is for 1998 and Social expenditure information was available for the year 1994 [23, see, Table 9-1].

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