Costa-Font, Joan and Cowell, Frank
(2016)
The measurement of health inequalities: does status matter?
III Working Papers,
6.
International Inequalities Institute, The London School of Economics and Political Science, London, UK.
Abstract
The measurement of health inequalities usually involves either estimating the concentration
of health outcomes using an income-based measure of status or applying conventional
inequality-measurement tools to a health variable that is non-continuous or, in many cases,
categorical. However, these approaches are problematic as they ignore less restrictive
approaches to status. The approach in this paper is based on measuring inequality
conditional on an individual's position in the distribution of health outcomes: this enables us
to deal consistently with categorical data. We examine several status concepts to examine
self-assessed health inequality using the sample of world countries contained in the World
Health Survey. We also perform correlation and regression analysis on the determinants of
inequality estimates assuming an arbitrary cardinalisation. Our findings indicate major
heterogeneity in health inequality estimates depending on the status approach,
distributional-sensitivity parameter and measure adopted. We find evidence that pure health
inequalities vary with median health status alongside measures of government quality.
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