IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/hal/wpaper/halshs-00554267.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Issues and Challenges of Measurement of Health:Implications for Economic Research

Author

Listed:
  • Martine Audibert

    (CERDI - Centre d'Études et de Recherches sur le Développement International - UdA - Université d'Auvergne - Clermont-Ferrand I - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique)

Abstract

According to the human capital theory, health is a determinant of the economic development and should play a role in the fight against poverty. On the other side, the economic growth, by supplying better sanitation, water quality and hygiene, better education and income, may improve population's health. Economists, in investigating the relations between development and health, asked for valid and relevant health status measurement. But, on the other hand, the health concept is complex as health includes several dimensions, and researchers face a battery of health indicators. The purpose of this study is to discuss, specifically for economic research, the particularity of each health indicator, the potential bias of their measurement, their advantages, disadvantages, and interest. As health indicators are too numerous, a selection was done and the analysis concerns the most frequent indicators, but also those which should be more used into the economic research perspective. Discussed health indicators are life expectancy and healthy life expectancy at birth, mortality rates (maternal and infant mortality included), cause-specific morbidity rates, Dalys and Qalys.

Suggested Citation

  • Martine Audibert, 2011. "Issues and Challenges of Measurement of Health:Implications for Economic Research," Working Papers halshs-00554267, HAL.
    • Handle: RePEc:hal:wpaper:halshs-00554267
    Note: View the original document on HAL open archive server: https://shs.hal.science/halshs-00554267
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://shs.hal.science/halshs-00554267/document
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. John Strauss & Duncan Thomas, 1998. "Health, Nutrition, and Economic Development," Journal of Economic Literature, American Economic Association, vol. 36(2), pages 766-817, June.
    2. Angus Deaton, 2003. "Health, Inequality, and Economic Development," Journal of Economic Literature, American Economic Association, vol. 41(1), pages 113-158, March.
    3. France Portrait & Maarten Lindeboom & Dorly Deeg, 2001. "Life expectancies in specific health states: Results from a joint model of health status and mortality of older persons," Demography, Springer;Population Association of America (PAA), vol. 38(4), pages 525-536, November.
    4. Birchenall, Javier A. & Soares, Rodrigo R., 2009. "Altruism, fertility, and the value of children: Health policy evaluation and intergenerational welfare," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 93(1-2), pages 280-295, February.
    5. Evans, Mary F. & Smith, V. Kerry, 2005. "Do new health conditions support mortality-air pollution effects?," Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, Elsevier, vol. 50(3), pages 496-518, November.
    6. Marcel Kerkhofs & Maarten Lindeboom, 1995. "Subjective health measures and state dependent reporting errors," Health Economics, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 4(3), pages 221-235, May.
    7. T. J. Cole & C. J. Morley & A. J. Thornton & M. A. Fowler & P. H. Hewson, 1991. "A Scoring System to Quantify Illness in Babies Under 6 Months of Age," Journal of the Royal Statistical Society Series A, Royal Statistical Society, vol. 154(2), pages 287-304, March.
    8. Lachaud, Jean-Pierre, 2007. "HIV prevalence and poverty in Africa: Micro- and macro-econometric evidences applied to Burkina Faso," Journal of Health Economics, Elsevier, vol. 26(3), pages 483-504, May.
    9. Williams, Alan, 1996. "QALYs and ethics: A health economist's perspective," Social Science & Medicine, Elsevier, vol. 43(12), pages 1795-1804, December.
    10. Paul Gertler & Jonathan Gruber, 2002. "Insuring Consumption Against Illness," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 92(1), pages 51-70, March.
    11. Jere R. Behrman & Mark R. Rosenzweig, 2004. "Returns to Birthweight," The Review of Economics and Statistics, MIT Press, vol. 86(2), pages 586-601, May.
    12. Doorslaer, Eddy van & Jones, Andrew M., 2003. "Inequalities in self-reported health: validation of a new approach to measurement," Journal of Health Economics, Elsevier, vol. 22(1), pages 61-87, January.
    13. Williams, Alan & Cookson, Richard, 2000. "Equity in health," Handbook of Health Economics, in: A. J. Culyer & J. P. Newhouse (ed.), Handbook of Health Economics, edition 1, volume 1, chapter 35, pages 1863-1910, Elsevier.
    14. Abhijit Banerjee & Angus Deaton & Esther Duflo, 2004. "Wealth, Health, and Health Services in Rural Rajasthan," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 94(2), pages 326-330, May.
    15. Robert Evenson & Prabhu Pingali (ed.), 2007. "Handbook of Agricultural Economics," Handbook of Agricultural Economics, Elsevier, edition 1, volume 3, number 1.
    16. Huffman, Wallace E. & Orazem, Peter F., 2007. "Agriculture and Human Capital in Economic Growth: Farmers, Schooling and Nutrition," Handbook of Agricultural Economics, in: Robert Evenson & Prabhu Pingali (ed.), Handbook of Agricultural Economics, edition 1, volume 3, chapter 43, pages 2281-2341, Elsevier.
    17. Alan D. Lopez & Colin D. Mathers & Majid Ezzati & Dean T. Jamison & Christopher J. L. Murray, 2006. "Global Burden of Disease and Risk Factors," World Bank Publications - Books, The World Bank Group, number 7039, December.
    18. Anonymous, 1950. "World Health Organization," International Organization, Cambridge University Press, vol. 4(3), pages 501-505, August.
    19. Germano Mwabu, 2009. "The Production of Child Health in Kenya: A Structural Model of Birth Weight," Journal of African Economies, Centre for the Study of African Economies, vol. 18(2), pages 212-260, March.
    20. Clive Bell & Shantayanan Devarajan & Hans Gersbach, 2003. "The long-run economic costs of AIDS : theory and an application to South Africa," Policy Research Working Paper Series 3152, The World Bank.
    21. Anonymous, 1950. "World Health Organization," International Organization, Cambridge University Press, vol. 4(4), pages 683-686, November.
    22. Gouws, Eleanor & Bryce, Jennifer & Pariyo, George & Armstrong Schellenberg, Joanna & Amaral, João & Habicht, Jean-Pierre, 2005. "Measuring the quality of child health care at first-level facilities," Social Science & Medicine, Elsevier, vol. 61(3), pages 613-625, August.
    23. Anonymous, 1950. "World Health Organization," International Organization, Cambridge University Press, vol. 4(1), pages 144-145, February.
    24. Anonymous, 1950. "World Health Organization," International Organization, Cambridge University Press, vol. 4(2), pages 327-330, May.
    25. S. Fanshel & J. W. Bush, 1970. "A Health-Status Index and its Application to Health-Services Outcomes," Operations Research, INFORMS, vol. 18(6), pages 1021-1066, December.
    26. John Strauss & Paul J. Gertler & Omar Rahman & Kristin Fox, 1993. "Gender and Life-Cycle Differentials in the Patterns and Determinants of Adult Health," Journal of Human Resources, University of Wisconsin Press, vol. 28(4), pages 791-837.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Martine AUDIBERT & Pascale COMBES MOTEL & Alassane DRABO, 2010. "Global Burden of Disease and Economic Growth," Working Papers 201036, CERDI.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Martine Audibert, 2011. "Issues and Challenges of Measurement of Health:Implications for Economic Research," CERDI Working papers halshs-00554267, HAL.
    2. Daron Acemoglu & Simon Johnson, 2007. "Disease and Development: The Effect of Life Expectancy on Economic Growth," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 115(6), pages 925-985, December.
    3. Martine AUDIBERT, 2008. "Endemic diseases and agricultural productivity: Challenges and policy response," Working Papers 200823, CERDI.
    4. Koen Decancq & María Ana Lugo, 2009. "Measuring inequality of well-being with a correlation-sensitive multidimensional Gini index," Working Papers 124, ECINEQ, Society for the Study of Economic Inequality.
    5. Martin Gächter & Engelbert Theurl, 2010. "Convergence of the Health Status at the Local Level: Empirical Evidence from Austria," NRN working papers 2010-09, The Austrian Center for Labor Economics and the Analysis of the Welfare State, Johannes Kepler University Linz, Austria.
    6. José M. Aburto & Alyson A. van Raalte, 2017. "Lifespan dispersion in times of life expectancy fluctuation: the case of Central and Eastern Europe," MPIDR Working Papers WP-2017-018, Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Rostock, Germany.
    7. Gary Yeung & Gerard Berg & Maarten Lindeboom & France Portrait, 2014. "The impact of early-life economic conditionson cause-specific mortality during adulthood," Journal of Population Economics, Springer;European Society for Population Economics, vol. 27(3), pages 895-919, July.
    8. Yewulsew Mekuria & Daniel Yilma & Zeleke Mekonnen & Tesfaye Kassa & Lealem Gedefaw, 2016. "Renal Function Impairment and Associated Factors among HAART Naïve and Experienced Adult HIV Positive Individuals in Southwest Ethiopia: A Comparative Cross Sectional Study," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 11(8), pages 1-11, August.
    9. Lazuka, Volha, 2017. "The lasting health and income effects of public health formation in Sweden," Lund Papers in Economic History 153, Lund University, Department of Economic History.
    10. Vladimir M. Shkolnikov & Evgeny M. Andreev & Zhen Zhang & James E. Oeppen & James W. Vaupel, 2009. "Losses of expected lifetime in the US and other developed countries: methods and empirical analyses," MPIDR Working Papers WP-2009-042, Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Rostock, Germany.
    11. Martine AUDIBERT & Pascale COMBES MOTEL & Alassane DRABO, 2010. "Global Burden of Disease and Economic Growth," Working Papers 201036, CERDI.
    12. Schultz, T. Paul, 2010. "Population and Health Policies," Handbook of Development Economics, in: Dani Rodrik & Mark Rosenzweig (ed.), Handbook of Development Economics, edition 1, volume 5, chapter 0, pages 4785-4881, Elsevier.
    13. Nandita Saikia & Abhishek Singh & Domantas Jasilionis & Faujdar Ram, 2013. "Explaining the rural-urban gap in infant mortality in India," Demographic Research, Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Rostock, Germany, vol. 29(18), pages 473-506.
    14. Grosse, Scott, 1993. "Schistosomiasis And Water Resources Development: A Re-Evaluation Of An Important Environment-Health Linkage," Working Papers 11881, Environmental and Natural Resources Policy Training Project.
    15. Virginia Zarulli & Domantas Jasilionis & Dmitri Jdanov, 2012. "Changes in educational differentials in old-age mortality in Finland and Sweden between 1971-1975 and 1996-2000," Demographic Research, Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Rostock, Germany, vol. 26(19), pages 489-510.
    16. L. Daniel Staetsky, 2009. "Diverging trends in female old-age mortality: A reappraisal," Demographic Research, Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Rostock, Germany, vol. 21(30), pages 885-914.
    17. Norman Weatherby & Charles Nam & Larry Isaac, 1983. "Development, inequality, health care, and mortality at the older ages: a cross-national analysis," Demography, Springer;Population Association of America (PAA), vol. 20(1), pages 27-43, February.
    18. Devi Sridhar & Ngaire Woods, 2013. "Trojan Multilateralism: Global Cooperation in Health," Global Policy, London School of Economics and Political Science, vol. 4(4), pages 325-335, November.
    19. Markéta Pechholdová & Carlo-Giovanni Camarda & France Meslé & Jacques Vallin, 2017. "Reconstructing Long-Term Coherent Cause-of-Death Series, a Necessary Step for Analyzing Trends," European Journal of Population, Springer;European Association for Population Studies, vol. 33(5), pages 629-650, December.
    20. Goli, Srinivas & Perianayagam, Arokiasamy & Bhemeshawar, Reddy, 2013. "Socioeconomic Progress across the Major Indian states: Converging or Diverging," MPRA Paper 48978, University Library of Munich, Germany, revised 05 Aug 2013.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    cerdi;

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:hal:wpaper:halshs-00554267. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: CCSD (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.