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Monitoring income-related health differences between regions in Great Britain: A new measure for ordinal health data

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  • Allanson, Paul

Abstract

The paper proposes a new measure of the extent to which differences in population health status between the regions of a country are systematically related to regional prosperity. The headcount index of income-related health stratification has a straightforward interpretation as the population-weighted mean difference in the probabilities that the healthier of any two randomly chosen individuals will be from the richer rather than the poorer region from which they are drawn. Moreover, it is well-defined even if only ordinal health data are available, being directly applicable to polytomous categorical variables without the need for either dichotomisation or cardinalisation. The new index is used to examine the evolution of income-related health differences between the regions of Great Britain over the period from 1991 to 2008.

Suggested Citation

  • Allanson, Paul, 2017. "Monitoring income-related health differences between regions in Great Britain: A new measure for ordinal health data," Social Science & Medicine, Elsevier, vol. 175(C), pages 72-80.
    • Handle: RePEc:eee:socmed:v:175:y:2017:i:c:p:72-80
    DOI: 10.1016/j.socscimed.2016.12.033
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    Cited by:

    1. Frank A Cowell & Martyna Kobus & Radoslaw Kurek, 2017. "Welfare and Inequality Comparisons for Uni- and Multi-dimensional Distributions of Ordinal Data," STICERD - Public Economics Programme Discussion Papers 31, Suntory and Toyota International Centres for Economics and Related Disciplines, LSE.
    2. I. Josa & A. Aguado, 2020. "Measuring Unidimensional Inequality: Practical Framework for the Choice of an Appropriate Measure," Social Indicators Research: An International and Interdisciplinary Journal for Quality-of-Life Measurement, Springer, vol. 149(2), pages 541-570, June.
    3. Paul Allanson, 2022. "Ordinal health disparities between population subgroups: measurement and multivariate analysis with an application to the North-South divide in England," The Journal of Economic Inequality, Springer;Society for the Study of Economic Inequality, vol. 20(4), pages 841-860, December.
    4. Paul Allanson & Richard Cookson, 2022. "Comparing healthcare quality: A common framework for both ordinal and cardinal data with an application to primary care variation in England," Health Economics, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 31(12), pages 2593-2608, December.
    5. Valérie Bérenger & Jacques Silber, 2022. "On the Measurement of Happiness and of its Inequality," Journal of Happiness Studies, Springer, vol. 23(3), pages 861-902, March.

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    More about this item

    Keywords

    Headcount index; Income-related health stratification; Regional analysis; Ordinal data;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • D63 - Microeconomics - - Welfare Economics - - - Equity, Justice, Inequality, and Other Normative Criteria and Measurement
    • I14 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Health - - - Health and Inequality
    • I18 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Health - - - Government Policy; Regulation; Public Health

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