SAIMSARA Journal

Machine Generated Science • ISSN 3054-3991

Economic Inequality: Scoping Review with ☸️SAIMSARA.

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Issue 2, Volume 1, 2026

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• Last update: 2026-03-28 00:06:23
What is this paper about
This paper shows that economic inequality is not just a background social problem, but a force linked to worse health, weaker trust, more violence, and poorer collective resilience. The full paper is worth reading because it shows how inequality affects real outcomes across medicine, behavior, and society, and why both personal hardship and the perception of unfairness seem to matter.

DOI: 10.62487/saimsarad3689887

Abstract: The aim of this paper is to synthesize current research regarding the impacts of objective and perceived economic inequality on individual behavior, health outcomes, societal cohesion, and environmental sustainability. The review utilises 3319 original studies with 66949011 total participants (topic deduplicated ΣN). This evidence map suggests that economic inequality is a prominent cross-domain correlate of worse health, weaker social cohesion, and poorer environmental performance. Particularly salient signals included estimates that up to 45% of under-five mortality in high-burden African settings was attributable to economic inequality, a reported 22% increase in relative risk of child mortality at structural social frontiers, and a 0.58 per 1,000 resident decrease in primary care physician supply per 0.1 Gini increase in one local analysis. Across the mapped literature, inequality was repeatedly associated with infectious disease burden, chronic disease risk, catastrophic health expenditure, violence, reduced trust, and climate inaction, while perceived inequality often appeared especially relevant for distress, sleep, fairness judgments, and prosocial erosion. The pattern overall supports a role for inequality as a systemic condition that shapes both exposure to harm and the capacity to respond, indicating practical value in combining clinical attention to deprivation and financial toxicity with broader social protection and redistributive policy responses. Future research should prioritize longitudinal, context-sensitive studies that jointly measure objective and perceived inequality to clarify mechanisms, identify effect modifiers, and determine which policy levers most consistently reduce inequality-related harms across settings.

Keywords: Subjective economic inequality; Social cohesion; Intergenerational mobility; Health disparities; Environmental quality; Redistributive policies; Prosocial behavior; Unethical behavior; Social comparison; Economic growth

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