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The Global Joint Distribution of Income and Health

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Author Info
Ximing Wu () (Texas A&M University, Department of Agricultural Economics.)
Andreas Savvides () (Oklahoma State University; Department of Economics)
Thanasis Stengos () (University of Guelph; Department of Economics.)
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.

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Paper provided by University of Guelph, Department of Economics in its series Working Papers with number 0807.

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Length: 39 pages
Date of creation: 2008
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Handle: RePEc:gue:guelph:2008-7

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Related research
Keywords: Income; Health; Global Distribution; Inequality; Poverty;

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Find related papers by JEL classification:
O1 - Economic Development, Technological Change, and Growth - - Economic Development
O15 - Economic Development, Technological Change, and Growth - - Economic Development - - - Economic Development: Human Resources; Human Development; Income Distribution; Migration
O57 - Economic Development, Technological Change, and Growth - - Economywide Country Studies - - - Comparative Studies of Countries

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  10. Rodrigo R. Soares, 2005. "Mortality Reductions, Educational Attainment, and Fertility Choice," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 95(3), pages 580-601, June. [Downloadable!]
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  14. François Bourguignon & Christian Morrisson, 2001. "Inequality among World Citizens : 1820-1992," DELTA Working Papers 2001-18, DELTA (Ecole normale supérieure).
  15. Wu, Ximing, 2003. "Calculation of maximum entropy densities with application to income distribution," Journal of Econometrics, Elsevier, vol. 115(2), pages 347-354, August. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
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  18. Foster, James & Greer, Joel & Thorbecke, Erik, 1984. "A Class of Decomposable Poverty Measures," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 52(3), pages 761-66, May. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
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