Health and Deprivation: A New Approach Applied to 32 Argentinian Urban Areas

Deprivation indexes have been used to analyze various urban contexts in different areas of the world. Argentina offers many examples of fragmented urban realities, as segregation and inequality in the inner city. Our first objective is to examine deprivation in relation to health in the urban Argentinian areas and to propose the Argentina Deprivation Index, extracted from the 2017 Argentina Permanent Household Survey (EPH). Five variables—four related to material and the other to social deprivation—were identified. Subsequently the Adjusted Mazziotta–Pareto Index and a hierarchical cluster analysis were applied to calculate the classes of the index. The results are encouraging, and they allow us to state that the deprivation index proposed explain in a significant way the variability of life expectancy at birth. Even though this study is not free of limitations, these results are expected to be helpful in the formulation of a new approach to the study of the deprivation in Argentina.