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The Global Joint Distribution of Income and Health

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  • Ximing Wu
  • Andreas Savvides
  • Thanasis Stengos

Abstract

We investigate the evolution of global welfare in two dimensions: income per capita and life expectancy. First, we estimate the marginal distributions of income and life expectancy separately. More importantly, in contrast to previous univariate approaches, we consider income and life expectancy jointly and estimate their bivariate global distribution for 137 countries during 1970 - 2000. We reach several conclusions: the global joint distribution has evolved from a bimodal into a unimodal one, the evolution of the health distribution has preceded that of income, global inequality and poverty has decreased over time and the evolution of the global distribution has been welfare improving. Our decomposition of overall welfare indicates that global inequality would be underestimated if within-country inequality is not taken into account. Moreover, global inequality and poverty would be substantially underestimated if the dependence between the income and health distributions is ignored.

Suggested Citation

  • Ximing Wu & Andreas Savvides & Thanasis Stengos, 2008. "The Global Joint Distribution of Income and Health," CESifo Working Paper Series 2367, CESifo.
    • Handle: RePEc:ces:ceswps:_2367
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    Cited by:

    1. Guido Erreygers & Philip Clarke & Qiong Zheng, 2017. "On the measurement of socioeconomic inequality of health between countries," The Journal of Economic Inequality, Springer;Society for the Study of Economic Inequality, vol. 15(2), pages 175-193, June.

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    More about this item

    Keywords

    income; health; global distribution; inequality; poverty;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • O10 - Economic Development, Innovation, Technological Change, and Growth - - Economic Development - - - General
    • O15 - Economic Development, Innovation, Technological Change, and Growth - - Economic Development - - - Economic Development: Human Resources; Human Development; Income Distribution; Migration
    • O57 - Economic Development, Innovation, Technological Change, and Growth - - Economywide Country Studies - - - Comparative Studies of Countries

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