Labour, capital, and the Nordic health paradox

While Nordic countries are associated with comparatively low levels of economic inequality, their social mortality gradient is comparable in magnitude to that found in far less egalitarian societies, a phenomenon commonly referred to as 'the Nordic health paradox'. This paper argues that much of this apparent paradox may stem from an overly narrow conception of economic inequality, which tends to be centred around the distribution of labour market earnings at the expense of other sources of inequality. Using administrative data covering the Norwegian working-age population between 2006 and 2024, we chart the all-cause mortality gradient not only by labour income, but also by capital income and wealth. We find that returns to wealth are associated with mortality above and beyond labour income, net of key sociodemographic controls, and that the resulting gradient is markedly steeper for wealth than for labour income alone. These findings suggest that traditional, labour-income-centred measures of economic inequality incompletely capture the resources that shape survival, and that incorporating wealth in particular can help make sense of the persistence of health inequalities in Norway. More broadly, the results point to the importance of considering dimensions of inequality beyond those emerging from labour-market institutions alone. Because our analysis is confined to a single country, it does not permit a direct cross-national comparison, but it offers a template for revisiting the Nordic health paradox elsewhere using more comprehensive measures of economic resources.