The relationship between health poverty and income poverty in Sub-Saharan African countries: evidence from index correlations

Ousmane Traoré ()
Additional contact information
Ousmane Traoré: Université Thomas Sankara (UTS)

SN Business & Economics, 2021, vol. 1, issue 10, 1-19

Abstract: Abstract Analysis of the relationship between income and health is increasing in economic research. However, researchers in this area face controversies concerning absolute and relative income hypotheses and criticisms of statistical artefacts. This paper adopted the assumption underlying income- and health-related hypotheses that the distribution of income is correlated with the distribution of health in a society or a region. We used the Foster–Greer–Thorbecke poverty norms to calculate the incidence, intensity, and inequality of ‘health poverty’ and ‘income poverty’ across Sub-Saharan African (SSA) countries and used time-series econometrics methods to analyse the relationships between the indices. The data were drawn from the World Bank indicators and covered the period from 1990 to 2017. The autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) cointegration bounds tests highlighted stronger cointegration between health-poverty intensity and income-poverty intensity, as well as between health-poverty inequality and income-poverty inequality. Moreover, the dynamic simulations of the ARDL relationships showed that a one-point shock in income-poverty intensity or inequality produced small increases in health-poverty intensity and inequality, respectively. The increases were not significant in the short term, but grew significantly over time, with predicted values of approximately 0.17 and 0.02, respectively. Our results highlighted that efforts to reduce population health disparities in the income- and health-poorer populations in a region should focus on both health- and income-promoting policies.

Keywords: Health poverty; Income poverty; Cointegration; Dynamic simulation; Sub-Saharan Africa (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C15 C22 C43 I32 O55 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s43546-021-00131-z Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

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:spr:snbeco:v:1:y:2021:i:10:d:10.1007_s43546-021-00131-z

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.springer.com/journal/43546

DOI: 10.1007/s43546-021-00131-z

Access Statistics for this article

SN Business & Economics is currently edited by Gino D'Oca

More articles in SN Business & Economics from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().