Abstract

The concern of this paper lies with the economic theory of the "demand for health". It develops a conceptual apparatus for analysing the interaction of socioeconomic determinants of health and indicates how this can be used to shed light on a variety of topical policy issues such as socioeconomic inequalities in health and the design of prevention policies. It is written with the aim of making what has hitherto been a mathematically sophisticated literature accessible to the non-economist.