Socio-economic position

Possibly one of the most pressing concerns in the debate on the ageing population is whether individuals will have adequate economic resources to maintain sufficient standards of living in retirement, and, if not, what the government can provide, in terms of health care and retirement income, to meet the needs of a population with an increasing fraction of older individuals. Yet this is only one reason to be interested in the incomes and wealth of older individuals. An equally important set of issues surround the relationship between financial resources and health outcomes over an individual's lifetime. Previous research on this question has typically analysed variation in health outcomes with broader measures of socio-economic position, such as occupational group, social class or even home-ownership. In the UK, such research has only occasionally looked at differences in current income, and even more rarely looked at differences in wealth, not least because of lack of data. The ELSA data provide individual- and family-level indicators of all these dimensions for the first time. Therefore in this chapter we concentrate on describing all aspects of ѳocio-economic position' in the population in England and discuss the way in which they are related to health outcomes measured very broadly.