Investigating the Impact of the Great Recession (2007-2009) on Socioeconomic Inequalities in Blood Pressure in Canada using Distributional Decomposition.

The Great Recession of 2007 to 2009 led to widespread unemployment and financial losses for families. Since income is a crucial determinant of health, the crisis may have led to adverse health outcomes. However, despite the abundance of research on the health impacts of the Great Recession, few studies have been conducted in the Canadian context and there appear to be inconsistent conclusions across disciplines. This inconsistency may exist because most studies use extreme measures of health (e.g., hypertension) which do not capture less severe but more pervasive health impacts. These subtle albeit widespread impacts can be examined by studying a population's distribution of a health outcome, such as blood pressure. However, a distributional approach has been absent in population health literature due to longstanding methodological challenges, until now. My proposed master's thesis will use a novel method known as distributional decomposition (DD) to evaluate changes in the blood pressure distributions of Canadians pre- and post-recession. I will use DD to quantify how much variation in income contributed to variation in blood pressure between 2007 and 2010. Quantifying the impact of income on variations in blood pressure distributions pre- and post-recession can inform effective policymaking to mitigate widening socioeconomic and health inequalities in Canada. This research is pertinent to the current socioeconomic climate as COVID-19 may lead Canada into another recession. My study is the first to use a distributional approach to investigate the health impacts of the Great Recession and will enhance our understanding of how economic crises impact socioeconomic disparities in health.