“Mirror, mirror, on the wall, who in this land is fairest of all?”—Distributional sensitivity in the measurement of socioeconomic inequality of health
Abstract
This paper explores four alternative indices for measuring health inequalities in a way that takes into account attitudes towards inequality. First, we revisit the extended concentration index which has been proposed to make it possible to introduce changes into the distributional value judgements implicit in the standard concentration index. Next, we suggest an alternative index based on a different weighting scheme. In contrast to the extended concentration index, this new index has the ‘symmetry’ property. We also show how these indices can be generalized so that they satisfy the ‘mirror’ property, which may be seen as a desirable property when dealing with bounded variables. We compare the different indices empirically for under-five mortality rates and the number of antenatal visits in developing countries.Download Info
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Bibliographic Info
Article provided by Elsevier in its journal Journal of Health Economics.
Volume (Year): 31 (2012)
Issue (Month): 1 ()
Pages: 257-270
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Web page: http://www.elsevier.com/locate/inca/505560
Related research
Keywords: Health inequality; Socioeconomic inequality; Extended concentration index; Distributional sensitivity; Small-sample bias;Find related papers by JEL classification:
- I19 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Health - - - Other
- I32 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Welfare and Poverty - - - Measurement and Analysis of Poverty
- D63 - Microeconomics - - Welfare Economics - - - Equity, Justice, Inequality, and Other Normative Criteria and Measurement
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