Incorporating inequality aversion in health-care priority setting

Joan Costa-Font and Frank Cowell ()

LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library

Abstract: Although measures of sensitivity to inequality are important in judging the welfare effects of health-care programmes, it is far from straightforward how to elicit them and apply them in health-care decision-making. This paper provides an overview of the literature on the measurement of inequality aversion, examines some of the features specific of the health domain that depart from the income domain, and discusses its implementation in health-system priority-setting decisions. We find evidence that individuals exhibit a preference for more equitable health distribution, but inequality aversion estimates from the literature are unclear. Unlike the income-inequality literature, standard approaches in the health economics do not follow a ‘veil-of-ignorance’ approach and elicit mostly bivariate (income-related health) inequality aversion estimates. We suggest some ideas to reduce the disconnect between the income inequality and health economics literature.

Keywords: attitudes to inequality; inequality aversion; health; income; survey data; priority setting (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I19 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 14 pages
Date: 2019-06-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hea and nep-ltv
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Published in Social Justice Research, 1, June, 2019, 32(2), pp. 172-185. ISSN: 0885-7466

Downloads: (external link)
http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/100128/ Open access version. (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Incorporating Inequality Aversion in Health-Care Priority Setting (2019)
Working Paper: Incorporating Inequality Aversion in Health-Care Priority Setting (2019)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ehl:lserod:100128

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library LSE Library Portugal Street London, WC2A 2HD, U.K.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by LSERO Manager ().