Health Status Convergence at the Local Level: Empirical Evidence from Austria

Martin Gächter and Engelbert Theurl ()

Working Papers from Faculty of Economics and Statistics, Universität Innsbruck

Abstract: Health is an important dimension of welfare comparisons across individuals, regions or states. In the following paper we focus on the question whether the health status between geographical subunits (local communities) converged/diverged in the time period 1969 - 2004 in Austria. We use age standardized mortality rates as indicators for the health status and analyze the convergence/divergence of overall mortality for (i) the whole population, (ii) females, (iii) males and (iv) the gender gap in overall mortality. Convergence/Divergence is studied by applying different concepts of cross-regional inequality (weighted standard deviation, coefficient of variation, Theil-Coefficient of inequality). Various econometric techniques (weighted OLS, Quantile Regression, Kendall's Rank Concordance) are used to test for absolute and conditional beta-convergence in mortality. We find mixed results for the applied inequality measures. Absolute and conditional beta-convergence are confirmed, both in weighted OLS as well as in Quantile Regression estimations, but we also find strong evidence for the existence of convergence clubs in mortality in Austria.

Keywords: mortality; convergence; gender; health status; life expectancy; Austria (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I10 I12 I18 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 30
Date: 2010-09, Revised 2011-03
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hea
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (19)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www2.uibk.ac.at/downloads/c4041030/wpaper/2010-23.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
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:inn:wpaper:2010-23

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Faculty of Economics and Statistics, Universität Innsbruck Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Judith Courian ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).