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How welfare states influence population health and health inequalities has long been debated but less well tested by empirical research. This book presents new empirical evidence of the effects of Swedish welfare state structures and policies on the lives of Swedish citizens. However, the discussion, analysis and innovative theoretical approaches developed in the book have wide implications for health research and policy beyond Scandinavian borders

In this commentary we discuss and elaborate on a number of topics that have been raised in the articles in this issue. The first topic treated is causality. All scientists are aware of the difficulties of making causal inferences in non‐experimental settings, and in many cases arguments are forwarded that support the causal interpretation of the reported relationships. Questions of bi‐directional causality, nonlinear relationships and the importance of omitted variables are discussed, as is the supporting evidence that in some cases comes from experimental studies. The second topic is the level of analysis employed in the empirical analyses and the difficulty of interpreting findings at a different level of aggregation than the level applied in these analyses. In this context, the importance of applying a person‐orientation is pointed out to ensure that the findings are interpretable at the level of the single individual. Even in individual‐level analyses, this can be problematic if one relies on group statistics produced within a variable‐oriented framework. The third topic concerns how to handle interactions and nonlinear relationships. The fourth topic concerns the importance of improving measurements so that a good correspondence is achieved between them and the theoretical conceptualisations. The fifth and last topic is concerned with the argument that different ways of investigating the generalisability of the results to different populations should be tried.

While much research points to the importance of a range of welfare state policies to reduce inequalities in health, the growing literature in this field is full of mixed and contradictory results. In this paper, we provide a brief discussion about the different conceptual and methodological approaches used in comparative research on the relationship between welfare policies and health. Against a theoretical discussion of possible linkages among one central welfare policy, unemployment benefit schemes, and health, we also provide examples of findings on how two central dimensions of such schemes—coverage and replacement rates—are linked to health and health inequalities across Europe. These examples indicate not only that welfare state programs can contribute to smaller health inequalities but also that their effectiveness in this respect depends on their institutional set-up.

Lundberg O, Fritzell J, Åberg Yngwe M, Kölegård ML. The potential power of social policy programmes: income redistribution, economic resources and healthInt J Soc Welfare 2010: ••: ••–••© 2010 The Author(s), Journal compilation © 2010 Blackwell Publishing Ltd and International Journal of Social Welfare.This Supplement includes a number of articles dealing with the role of social policy schemes for public health across the life course. As a key social determinant of health, poverty and its consequences have historically been at the forefront of the public health discussion. But also in rich countries today, economic resources are likely to be important for health and survival, both on an individual and an aggregate level. This introductory article serves as a background for the more specific analyses that follow. The focus is on why income and income inequality could have an effect on individual and population health. We discuss relationships between the individual and population levels and between income and health, and some of the possible mechanisms involved. We also present arguments for why welfare state institutions may matter.