Income or living standard and health in Germany: different ways of measurement of relative poverty with regard to self-rated health.

Objectives: Current study introduces the living standard concept as an alternative approach of measuring poverty and compares its explanatory power to an income-based poverty measure with regard to subjective health status of the German population.

Methods: Analyses are based on the German Socio-Economic Panel (2001, 2003 and 2005) and refer to binary logistic regressions of poor subjective health status with regard to each poverty condition, their duration and their causal influence from a previous time point. To calculate the discriminate power of both poverty indicators, initially the indicators were considered separately in regression models and subsequently, both were included simultaneously.