SUMMARY The concern of this paper lies with the economic theory of the "demand for health". It
develops a conceptual apparatus for analysing the interaction of socioeconomic determinants of
health and indicates how this can be used to shed light on a variety of topical policy issues such as
socioeconomic inequalities in health and the design of prevention policies. It is written with the aim
of making what has hitherto been a mathematically sophisticated literature accessible to the
non-economist.