Publication type
Report
Series
IFS Deaton Review of Inequalities
Authors
Publication date
August 15, 2023
Summary:
In this commentary, we give some summary, high-level evidence on the prevalence of disabilities and inequalities in disability over age, socio-economic status and region. We also focus on the interaction between disability and labour market participation. Our analysis is far from exhaustive but does provide a glimpse into how important, and how large, these inequalities are, how they steadily accumulate from early adulthood onwards, and how these patterns have been changing over time. There is a strong need for more work in the area, in particular work that can bring issues of inequalities in, and by, disabilities of different types more to the fore in the mainstream of empirical analysis of inequality.
We will show that inequalities in the prevalence of disability, defined across educational qualifications, are large. As with health inequalities, they emerge steadily across all ages of the life cycle, although this emergence is patterned somewhat differently for physical versus mental disabilities. These inequalities are highly consequential by the time a generation has reached older working age, being strongly related to both labour market participation and to quality of life. As a result, they will also have important consequences for inequalities in well-being in retirement as well as for future social care needs.
We document the emergence of large inequalities in mental health disabilities at younger ages for recent birth cohorts. This is likely to have consequences for future inequalities in broader disability and for the physical health of those cohorts in the future, particularly given the links between mental health and health behaviours and social participation, each of which are risk factors for future physical health and longevity – as pointed out by Fancourt and Steptoe (2022) in their commentary on the Case and Kraftman (2022) chapter for the IFS Deaton Review.
Subjects
Link
https://ifs.org.uk/inequality/inequalities-in-disability/
#567913