The Global Joint Distribution of Income and Health

44 Pages Posted: 20 Aug 2008

See all articles by Ximing Wu

Ximing Wu

Texas A&M University - Department of Agricultural Economics

Andreas Savvides

Oklahoma State University - Stillwater - Department of Economics & Legal Studies in Business

Thanasis Stengos

University of Guelph - Department of Economics

Multiple version iconThere are 2 versions of this paper

Date Written: August 2008

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.

Keywords: income, health, global distribution, inequality, poverty

JEL Classification: O1, O15, O57

Suggested Citation

Wu, Ximing and Savvides, Andreas and Stengos, Thanasis, The Global Joint Distribution of Income and Health (August 2008). CESifo Working Paper Series No. 2367, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=1237462 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1237462

Ximing Wu

Texas A&M University - Department of Agricultural Economics ( email )

College Station, TX 77843-4218
United States

HOME PAGE: http://agecon2.tamu.edu/people/faculty/wu-ximing/

Andreas Savvides

Oklahoma State University - Stillwater - Department of Economics & Legal Studies in Business ( email )

201 Business Building
Stillwater, OK 74078-0555
United States

Thanasis Stengos (Contact Author)

University of Guelph - Department of Economics ( email )

50 Stone Road East
Guelph, Ontario N1G 2W1
Canada

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