What does Eurostat’s labour force survey tell us about health in EU-25?

Stefano Mazzuco, Università di Padova
Marc Suhrcke, World Health Organization (WHO)

Finding appropriate, comparable survey data on morbidity and ill-health (as opposed to mortality) at the European level is no small challenge, in particular if the interest is to link the information to socioeconomic indicators at the individual level. In the present paper we exploit a unique source of information that to date seems to have been ignored by health researchers: the European Labour Force Survey (LFS), a harmonised collection of data coming from all the Labour force surveys conducted in the EU-25 countries, for many countries data is available from 1983 up to 2004. We try to fill this gap and explore the potential use of this data set for health purposes along two basic dimensions: first to assess overall health patterns across countries and time; second, to assess the socioeconomic distribution of health within countries and over time.