Health and income: A robust comparison of Canada and the US

This paper uses sequential stochastic dominance procedures to compare the joint distribution of health and income across space and time. It is the first application of which we are aware of methods to compare multidimensional distributions of income and health using procedures that are robust to aggregation techniques. The paper’s approach is more general than comparisons of health gradients and does not require the estimation of health equivalent incomes. We illustrate the approach by contrasting Canada and the US using comparable data. Canada dominates the US over the lower bi-dimensional well-being distribution of health and income, though not generally in terms of the marginal distribution of health. The paper also finds that well-being for both Canadians and Americans has not generally improved during the last decade over the joint distribution of income and health, in spite of the fact that the marginal distributions of income have improved during that period.