It is widely recognised that poverty is associated with poor health even in advanced industrial societies. But most existing studies of the relationship between the availability of financial resources and health status fail to distinguish between the transient and permanent impact of poverty on...

The government’s report, Opportunity for All: Tackling Poverty and Social Exclusion (Department of Social Security, 1999), identified poor health as one of the major problems associated with low income. However, much of the available evidence on the relationship between income and health is of...