Income Inequality and HIV in Zambia

Abstract: Poverty has previously been viewed as one of the most important drivers of the HIV epidemic. However, recent studies have found that poor individuals are not more likely than wealthy to be HIV positive. Therefore, economic inequality together with gender inequality has instead been suggested as the main socioeconomic drivers of the spread of HIV. The studies analyzing the relationship between economic inequality and HIV are however few and most of them have used cross-country data and are thus likely to suffer from omitted variable bias and hide large variations in the individual data. This study has therefore, by using cross-sectional data of young women in Zambia, analyzed the relationship at an individual level. The empirical findings show a strong positive relationship between income inequality and risk of HIV infection. This relationship was also found to be related to riskier sexual behavior.