Subjective and Objective Health of the Population Aged 50+ and the Welfare State Regimes in 16 European Countries

Health at 50+ issues are particularly important now, when the inevitable increase in the old-age dependency ratio calls for governmental involvement in measures that are aimed at mitigating the negative effects of population aging in Europe. The investigations of differences between the subjective and objective health measures in a welfare state regime perspective have not been conducted before although it can be assumed that such analyses might provide valuable information about the impact of welfare regime on health as well as about the interchangeability between the self-reported and measured health.

The main objective of this study was to determine whether the type of welfare regime influences the subjective and objective health of the population aged 50+. Hierarchical logistic regression models were applied to examine this subject. Analyses were conducted for 16 European countries (N=57236) classified into four different types of welfare regimes: social democratic, post-socialist, conservative-corporatist and Mediterranean. The empirical results suggest that the type of welfare regime helps to explain the variations in the subjective health between countries as well as the differences between individuals. However, it does not explain the differences in objective health when analyzing all socio-economic groups collectively. Analyzes performed within defined socioeconomic groups showed that the types of welfare regimes differentiated between both subjective and objective health in the majority of defined groups, however, the health of those least well-of in all of the analyzed welfare regimes was found to be similar. The different results obtained for both subjective and objective health in post-socialist and Mediterranean countries suggest that these two types of measurement should not be used interchangeably.