On a New Class of Measures for Health Inequality Based on Self-Reported Health Outcomes
19 Pages Posted: 3 Nov 2013
Date Written: September 1, 2013
Abstract
In many instances, individual health outcomes are self-reported on several ordinal scales. The ordinal nature of the data creates some challenging problems in the measurement of inequalities of various distributions of health outcomes in a population. In this paper, we propose and discuss a class of measures of inequalities of heath outcome distributions based on such ordinal data. Our measures are easy to compute and have some desirable properties often required for a reasonable measure for health inequality.
Keywords: health inequality, slef-reported health outcomes, additivity, invariance of simple switches, invariance of parallel shifts, perfect equality
JEL Classification: D63, H23, I18
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation