The additional costs of living with a disability in the UK

Last year I worked on the article, “Estimating the additional costs of living with a disability in the United Kingdom between 2013 and 2016,” which was based on my undergraduate dissertation and which just got published in the European Journal of Health Economics.

My co-authors Luke Munford and Marcello Morciano are affiliated with the School of Health Sciences at the University of Manchester.

Abstract

In the United Kingdom, more than 20% of the population live with a disability. Past evidence shows that being disabled is associated with functional limitations that often cause social exclusion and poverty. Therefore, it is necessary to analyse the connection between disability and poverty. This paper examines whether households with disabled members face extra costs of living to attain the same standard of living as their peers without disabled members. The modelling framework is based on the standard of living approach which estimates the extra income required to close the gap between households with and without disabled members. We apply an ordered logit regression to data from the Family Resources Survey between 2013 and 2016 to analyse the relationship between standard of living, income, and disability, conditional on other explanatory variables. We find that households with disabled members face considerable extra costs that go beyond the transfer payment of the government. The average household with disabled members saw their weekly extra costs continually increase from £293 in 2013 to £326 in 2016 [2020 prices]. Therefore, the government needs to adjust welfare policies to address the problem of extra costs faced by households with disabled members.

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