The measurement of health inequalities: does status matter?

Joan Costa-Font and Frank Cowell ()

The Journal of Economic Inequality, 2022, vol. 20, issue 2, No 2, 299-325

Abstract: Abstract Approaches to measuring health inequalities are often problematic because they use methods that are inappropriate for categorical data. In this paper we focus on “pure” or univariate health inequality (rather than income-related or bivariate health inequality) and use a concept of individual status that allows a consistent treatment of such data. We take alternative versions of the status concept and apply methods for treating categorical data to examine self-assessed health inequality for the countries included in the World Health Survey. We also use regression analysis on the apparent determinants of these health inequality estimates. We show that the status concept that is used will affect health-inequality rankings across countries and the way health inequality is related to countries’ median health, income, demographics and governance.

Keywords: Health inequality; Categorical data; Entropy measures; Health surveys; Upward status; Downward status (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D63 H23 I18 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

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Related works:
Working Paper: The measurement of health inequalities: does status matter? (2022)
Working Paper: The Measurement of Health Inequalities: Does Status Matter? (2019)
Working Paper: The Measurement of Health Inequalities: Does Status Matter? (2016)
Working Paper: The measurement of health inequalities: does status matter? (2016)
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DOI: 10.1007/s10888-021-09497-4

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