Health poverty

While research on (social) health inequality is substantial, studies on health poverty are not plentiful. This book chapter looks at the methodological and empirical literature on health poverty in the economics and health economics fields. Some challenges to defining and measuring this type of poverty are highlighted. In particular, a challenge is that when measuring poverty for ordinal data, such as self-assessed health which is widely used in research, employing the usual tools developed to measure (income) poverty is not possible. Another challenge is that there is no universal agreement on the definition of the poverty line in the health field. Our review distinguishes between different types of health data (including ordinal and continuous data) and presents the unidimensional poverty indices appropriate for each data type. Finally, we review research on multidimensional poverty, since it usually takes the health dimension into account.