Overcrowding and Indigenous health in Australia

Abstract

We use unique survey data from the 2001 National Health Survey to examine the association between overcrowding and the self-assessed health of Indigenous and non- Indigenous Australians. Our goal is to determine whether or not overcrowding explains why the Indigenous population has worse health than the non-Indigenous population. We find that, after we control for a number of factors, overcrowding of adults (i) appears to be associated with worse health and (ii) explains approximately 30% of the health gap between the Indigenous population living in remote areas and the non-Indigenous population.