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A multivariate analysis of the distribution of individual's welfare in China: What is the role of health?

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  • Zhong, Hai

Abstract

Many economists have argued that income is an inadequate indicator of welfare. In this paper, we conduct a multivariate analysis of the distribution of individual welfare in China at three selected time points: 1991, 1997 and 2006. Instead of using income as the only welfare indicator as in most distributional analyses, we explicitly consider the role of health in welfare distribution. We adopt the Naga and Geoffard (2006) decomposition method by which we can decompose a bidimensional welfare inequality index into two univariate Atkinson-Kolm-Sen indices that measure the inequalities in health and income, and a third term that measures the contribution from the joint distribution of the two attributes to total inequality. We show that the third term might be used as an alternative to the concentration index to measure the income-related inequality in health.

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  • Zhong, Hai, 2009. "A multivariate analysis of the distribution of individual's welfare in China: What is the role of health?," Journal of Health Economics, Elsevier, vol. 28(6), pages 1062-1070, December.
    • Handle: RePEc:eee:jhecon:v:28:y:2009:i:6:p:1062-1070
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    Cited by:

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    2. Wisdom Akpalu & Aaron K. Christian & Samuel Nii Ardey Codjoe, 2015. "Does food insecurity impact subjective evaluation of Well-being? Evidence from a developing country," WIDER Working Paper Series 030, World Institute for Development Economic Research (UNU-WIDER).
    3. Xu, Aiting & Qiu, Keyang & Zhu, Yuhan, 2023. "The measurements and decomposition of innovation inequality: Based on Industry − University − Research perspective," Journal of Business Research, Elsevier, vol. 157(C).
    4. Guido Erreygers & Roselinde Kessels, 2017. "Socioeconomic Status and Health: A New Approach to the Measurement of Bivariate Inequality," IJERPH, MDPI, vol. 14(7), pages 1-23, June.
    5. Wisdom Akpalu & Aaron K. Christian & Samuel Nii Ardey Codjoe, 2015. "Does Food Insecurity Impact Subjective Evaluation of Well-being?: Evidence From a Developing Country," WIDER Working Paper Series wp-2015-030, World Institute for Development Economic Research (UNU-WIDER).
    6. Martyna Kobus & Radosław Kurek, 2019. "Multidimensional polarization for ordinal data," The Journal of Economic Inequality, Springer;Society for the Study of Economic Inequality, vol. 17(3), pages 301-317, September.
    7. Abul Naga, Ramses H. & Shen, Yajie & Yoo, Hong Il, 2016. "Joint hypothesis tests for multidimensional inequality indices," Economics Letters, Elsevier, vol. 141(C), pages 138-142.
    8. Guido Erreygers & Philip Clarke & Qiong Zheng, 2017. "On the measurement of socioeconomic inequality of health between countries," The Journal of Economic Inequality, Springer;Society for the Study of Economic Inequality, vol. 15(2), pages 175-193, June.

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