Does Inequality Matter Air Pollution and Health Relationship?: The Turkish Case

Turkey has been going through a transformation process from agrarianto industrialization. This process brings socio-economic and environmental problems, together. Theoretically, inequality is related with the increase in pollution after a subsequent decrease. However, empirical evidence about this relation is mixed. Our aim is to explore if air quality is an important channel through which inequalities affect individuals’ health considering economic and geographical differentiations among regions of Turkey which display diverse and heterogeneous characteristics. There exists east and west dichotomy. For the empirical work, data has drawn from the SILC for the years 2009 and 2010. Pollution data is provided by Air Quality Statistics. Nested and multinomial logistic regressions are preferred to explore the relationship between pollution and health accounting for inequality. Regions where income is more equally distributed, ratio of reporting fair or poor health for an increase in air pollution is lower than the analogous ratio for regions in which income is less equally distributed. Inequality is found to be a significant factor for the relationship between health and pollution.