Edwin Ng

Renison University College

This chapter examines the topic of precarious employment in the context of health outcomes in two global regions: (a) Latin America and the Caribbean and (b) East Asia. First, drawing from several recent reports released by the International Labour Organization, it compares and contrasts the concepts of precarious employment and nonstandard employm...

Background: Workers holding intermediate hierarchical positions in an institution may have a higher risk of occupational stress-related, ill health. This study examined the prevalence rates and odds ratios (ORs) of anxiety disorders among a hierarchical group of firefighters. Methods: This cross-sectional study samples firefighters from Minas Ge...

This chapter addresses the needs for preventive measures to improve the unfair—and avoidable—living and working conditions that produce increased rates of mental disorders among poor workers, women, immigrants, and racial and ethnic minorities. It also addressees treatment to narrow persistent mental health disparities by providing high-quality men...

Aim: The aim of this study was to examine the relationship between welfare states and nursing professionalization indicators. Design: We used a time-series, cross-sectional design. The analysis covered 16 years and 22 countries: Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Netherlands, Ne...

Background: Nursing professionalization has substantial benefits for patients, health care systems, and the nursing workforce. Currently, however, there is limited understanding of the macro-level factors, such as policies and other country-level determinants, influencing both the professionalization process and the supply of nursing human resourc...

Previous research finds connections between women in government, promotion of women’s issues, and government spending. However, the connection between female politicians and population health warrants more significant attention. This study takes advantage of differences among Canadian provinces to evaluate the effect of women in government on age-s...

Background: Since the global economic crisis in 2007, unemployment rates have escalated in most European and North American countries. Unemployment protection policies, particularly the unemployment insurance (UI) system, have become a weighty issue for many modern welfare states. Decades of research have established concrete findings on the adver...

Family support policies (FSP) refer to government policies that promote the well-being of families with children (e.g. job-protected paid leave, cash transfers, childcare). We developed an initial conceptual and theoretical framework of FSP and conducted a realist-scoping review to document the state of evidence regarding the influence of FSP on th...

Recent scholarship offers different theories on how macrosocial determinants affect the population health of East and Southeast Asian nations. Dominant theories emphasize the effects of welfare regimes, welfare generosity, and labor market institutions. In this article, we conduct exploratory time-series cross-sectional analyses to generate new evi...

Most population health researchers conceptualize social class as a set of attributes and material conditions of life of individuals. The empiricist tradition of 'class as an individual attribute' equates class to an 'observation', precluding the investigation of unobservable social mechanisms. Another consequence of this view of social class is tha...

Recent work in comparative social epidemiology uses an expenditures approach to examine the link between welfare states and population health. More work is needed that examines the impact of disaggregated expenditures within nations. This study takes advantage of provincial differences within Canada to examine the effects of subnational expenditure...

This study tests whether social class exploitation operates as a relational mechanism that generates mental health inequalities in the nursing home industry. We ask, does social class exploitation (i.e., the acquisition of economic benefits from the labor of those who are dominated) have a systematic and predictable impact on depression among nursi...

The recent global recession and concurrent rise in job loss makes unemployment insurance (UI) increasingly important to smooth patterns of consumption and keep households from experiencing extreme material poverty. In this paper, we undertake a realist review to produce a critical understanding of how and why UI policies impact on poverty and healt...

The advancement of theory and research on macrosocial determinants of health has been identified as a promising path for future social epidemiology. In this commentary, we outline how macrosocial epidemiology can advance in two critical ways: (1) engaging scientific realism, and (2) incorporating social conflict. The first describes how scientific...

Socioeconomic status (SES) is a complex construct that is commonly used to understand mental health inequalities. SES refers to the social relations that determine what structural locations individuals or groups hold within society, which in turn influence the exposures, resources, and susceptibilities that produce mental health inequalities. The a...

Flexicurity, or the integration of labor market flexibility with social security and active labor market policies, has figured prominently in economic and social policy discussions in Europe since the mid-1990s. Such policies are designed to transcend traditional labor-capital conflicts and to form a mutually supportive nexus of flexibility and sec...

In 1999, newly-elected Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez initiated a far-reaching social movement as part of a political project known as the Bolivarian Revolution. Inspired by the democratic ideologies of Simón Bolívar, this movement was committed to reducing intractable inequalities that defined Venezuela's Fourth Republic (1958-1998). Given the a...

Using the 2002 World Health Survey, we examine the association between welfare state regimes, gender and mental health among 26 countries classified into seven distinct regimes: Conservative, Southeast Asian, Eastern European, Latin American, Liberal, Southern/Ex-dictatorship, and Social Democratic. A two-level hierarchical model found that the odd...

We review two major strands of sociological theory to understand possible causal processes relevant to the generation of social inequalities and the production of parallel mental health disparities. The first strand, known as the social stratification model, includes gradational measures of socioeconomic status and draws upon Weber’s idea of “life...

Recent social epidemiologic research has focused on the impact of politics, expressed as political traditions or parties and welfare state characteristics, on population health. Guided by a political economy of health and welfare regimes framework, this chapter synthesizes this growing body of evidence and locates 73 empirical and comparative studi...

Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett's latest book, The Spirit Level: Why Equality is Best for Everyone, has caught the attention of academics and policymakers and stimulated debate across the left-right political spectrum. Interest in income inequality has remained unabated since the publication of Wilkinson's previous volume, Unhealthy Societies: T...

In this paper, we consider social forces that affect the processes of both knowledge production and knowledge translation in relation to urban health research. First, we briefly review our conceptual model, derived from a social-conflict framework, to outline how unequal power relations and health inequalities are causally linked. Second, we critic...

An important contribution of the social determinants of health perspective has been to inquire about non-medical determinants of population health. Among these, labour market regulations are of vital significance. In this study, we investigate the labour market regulations among low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) and propose a labour market t...

In recent years, a research area has emerged within social determinants of health that examines the role of politics, expressed as political traditions/parties and welfare state characteristics, on population health. To better understand and synthesise this growing body of evidence, the present literature review, informed by a political economy of...

The aim of this study is to test the effects of neo-Marxian social class and potential mediators such as labor market position, work organization, material deprivation, and health behaviors on all-cause mortality. The authors use longitudinal data from the Barcelona 2000 Health Interview Survey (N=7526), with follow-up interviews through the munici...

Building on previous multilevel studies in social epidemiology, this cross-sectional study examines, simultaneously, the contextual effects of workplace exploitation and area-of-residence economic inequality on social inequalities in health among low-income nursing assistants. A total of 868 nursing assistants recruited from 55 nursing homes in Ken...

Since the nineteen seventies, high- and low-income countries have undergone a pattern of transnational economic and cultural integration known as globalization. The weight of the available evidence suggests that the effects of globalization on labor markets have increased economic inequality and various forms of economic insecurity that negatively...

Employment relations, as a theoretical framework for social class, represent a complementary approach to social stratification. Employment relations introduce social relations of ownership and control over productive assets to the analysis of inequalities in economic (e.g., income), power (occupational hierarchy), and cultural (e.g., education) res...

Extending previous Canadian-United States cancer survival comparisons in large metropolitan areas, this study compares breast cancer survival in smaller metropolitan areas: Winnipeg, Manitoba and Des Moines, Iowa. Manitoba and Iowa cancer registries, respectively, provided a total of 2,383 and 1,545 women with breast cancer (1984 to 1992, followed...

PURPOSE: Extending previous Canadian-United States cancer survival comparisons in large metropolitan areas, this study compares breast cancer survival in smaller metropolitan areas: Winnipeg, Manitoba and Des Moines, Iowa.METHODS: Manitoba and Iowa cancer registries, respectively, provided a total of 2,383 and 1,545 women with breast cancer (1984 t...