Living Conditions Survey

The main data used in this study have been derived from the Income and Living Conditions Survey (ILCS). ILCS is a cross-sectional survey which took place during the period 2006-2012 covering the respondents 15 years and older (Turkish Statistical Institute, 2013). The principal health outcome is the self-assessed health (SAH) defined by a response to the question “What is your general health status; “very good/good/fair/bad/very bad?” In order to give meaningful interpretations in the coefficients the health status variable is recoded from 1 (very bad health status) to 5 (very good health status). In table 1 the summary statistics of the variables employed in the analysis are presented. A factor analysis is followed in order to construct the

In this case, the set of variables take value 1 if the household is able to afford them and 0 otherwise. Following Filmer and Pritchett (2001), the procedure of principal components is applied in order to determine the weights for an index of the asset, items and financial capacity variables described before. Principal components is a technique that allows the extraction of orthogonal linear combinations of a set of variables, that provide and capture the common information most successful. In this procedure, the first principal component of a set of variables is the linear index of all the variables that captures the largest amount of information that is common to all of the variables. The estimation of the PCA coefficients are then employed to take the predicted or constructed wealth index (see Filmer and Pritchett, 2001 for more technical

More specifically, based on the previous literature, the main socio-economic variables employed is the gender, age, education level, employment status, house tenure, dwelling size and household size. There are various explanations why these variables are used as controls. It is well known from the literature that age is an important determinant for both health status and wealth. Old aged people are more likely to present negative effects on health, while older people are wealthier, as a result of wealth accumulation over years, higher wage due to increased productivity and working experience. Similarly education and income are very important factors, since more educated people have better knowledge about the health life style and various effects of other factors, including smoking, food diet, and sports. In line with education, higher income usually is a result of high education qualifications, since these people have better access and more opportunities in the labour market, implying higher wages. Income allows people to have access and to buy better quality health services. Employment status can be considered as a result of education, as it has been discussed above, while income can be the result of the employment status, since employed are more likely to earn more and thus can be wealthier than the unemployed, retired and those who are unable to work. This also results to a better health status. The house tenure