Desigualdades sociais em saúde: evidências empíricas sobre o caso brasileiro

Kenya Valeria M. S. Noronha and M™nica Viegas Andrade ()

Textos para Discussão Cedeplar-UFMG from Cedeplar, Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais

Abstract: The aim of this paper is to measure the socioeconomic health inequality in Brazil considering the differences among the federal states. We estimate the health concentration index. This work has two main contributions: first, it considers the differences in the health level of population among the federal states and second, it measures the socioeconomic health inequality considering all socioeconomic groups. The socioeconomic variables used are years of formal schooling and familiar income per capita. Even though, the majority of papers in the literature estimate health inequality using mortality as health indicator, in this paper we use morbidity measures. Morbidity measures are advantageous because they capture differences in the life quality of individuals in spite of only considering the cause of death. The data base used is PNAD (Pesquisa Nacional de Amostra Domiciliar), a National Household Survey accomplished by the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE). The main findings of this work is to perceive the existence of social health inequality in Brazil. Almost all health concentration indexes estimated showed a health inequality favoring the higher income groups. This result was robust for almost all health indicators except when the criteria used was the proportion of individuals in the whole population that presented chronic disease. This result was verified in all regions except the Northeastern region when we used familiar income per capita to classify social economic groups.

Keywords: healthcare services; Brazil; social inequality (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 35 pages
Date: 2002-06
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Published in Revista Econômica do Nordeste, 2001, vol. 32, pp. 877-897.

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.cedeplar.ufmg.br/pesquisas/td/TD%20171.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:cdp:texdis:td171

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
Cedeplar-FACE-UFMG Av. Antonio Carlos, 6627 Belo Horizonte, MG 31270-901 Brazil

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Textos para Discussão Cedeplar-UFMG from Cedeplar, Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais Cedeplar-FACE-UFMG Av. Antonio Carlos, 6627 Belo Horizonte, MG 31270-901 Brazil. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Gustavo Britto ().