AbstractThis paper looks at health inequality and deprivation, with a particular focus on developing countries. It is specifically concerned with relationships between health and income, especially the extent to which inequality and deprivation in the former is driven by changes in the latter. The paper reports increasing disparity in child mortality among country groups since the mid‐1970s. It also reports decreased inequality in life expectancy among countries from the early 1960s until the late 1980s and increased inequality thereafter. Similar patterns in life expectancy deprivation are reported. The paper finds that this is partly due to a changing behavioural relationship between life expectancy and income per capita among countries with low achievement in the former variable. The paper also introduces and provides an overview of the papers that follow in thisSupplement. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.