On a New Class of Measures for Health Inequality Based on Self-Reported Health Outcomes

19 Pages Posted: 3 Nov 2013

See all articles by Guangming Lv

Guangming Lv

Institute of National Accounts

Yang Wang

Tulane University, A.B. Freeman School of Business, Finance & Economics, Students

Yongsheng Xu

Georgia State University - Andrew Young School of Policy Studies

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

Lv, Guangming and Wang, Yang and Xu, Yongsheng, On a New Class of Measures for Health Inequality Based on Self-Reported Health Outcomes (September 1, 2013). Andrew Young School of Policy Studies Research Paper No. 13-17, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2348830 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2348830

Guangming Lv

Institute of National Accounts ( email )

19 Xinjiekou Outer St
Haidian District
Beijing, Guangdong 100875
China

Yang Wang

Tulane University, A.B. Freeman School of Business, Finance & Economics, Students ( email )

7 McAlister Drive
New Orleans, LA
United States

Yongsheng Xu (Contact Author)

Georgia State University - Andrew Young School of Policy Studies ( email )

Department of Economics
35 Broad Street, 6th Floor Department of Economics
Atlanta, GA 30303-3083
United States

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