Widening educational inequalities in mortality : an analysis for Austria with international comparisons

Recent studies have reported a widening in the relative mortality gap between the socioeconomic classes in several industrialized western countries. The present paper aims to determine whether or not education-related differentials in mortality have increased between 1981/82 and 1991/92 in Austria, and compares the findings with those from other European countries, the USA and New Zealand. For the Austrian analysis the source of the data is based on a one year mortality follow up of the entire Austrian census population, and contains for the examined population aged 30-74 in total 3,805,208 individual records for 1981/82 and 4,064,184 records for 1991/92 of which 34,218 and 29,443 were deceased. The study applies a sophisticated measure of inequality that takes into account the relative position of the educational groups, since changing educational compositions over time may reduce comparability. The findings suggest that educational inequalities in mortality have widened in Austria, but more among men than among women. The Austrian results are similar to patterns observed in the other countries. However, the international trends vary with regard to age groups and sex.