Women’s Health and Inequality in Argentina

Our main interest is to study the determinants of health inequalities among Argentinean women and the access to quality health services by vulnerable urban women.We focus on the role of financial, economic and family characteristics in addition to the local health systems. We use data from two sources— a nationwide representative survey and a micro/targeted survey. Our micro survey goes deeply into many aspects of the lives of women in a medium size urban area in Norwest Argentina .This area belongs to a large northern region of the country that has been labeled as “critical” by the UNDP because of the serious problems it faces and the need to device innovative policies to improve living conditions. This new data set allows us to investigate issues that are not feasible to study with the current nationwide surveys. We obtain not only a detailed picture of the economic and social aspects but also data on health history (woman and youngest child), preventive practice/access to health services, evaluation of health providers, willingness to pay for health services/insurance, borrowing/lending experience. Our preliminary results show sharp differences in health outcomes/preventive practices according to location, income and occupation both within the country and the area increasing our understanding of the causality directions.