Analyzing Health Equity Using Household Survey Data

A Guide to Techniques and their Implementation

Adam Wagstaff, Owen O'Donnell, Eddy van Doorslaer, Magnus Lindelow

• Publisher: World Bank Publications
• Year: 2007
• eBook ISBN:
  9780821369340
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: Development Economics

Have gaps in health outcomes between the poor and better off grown? Are they larger in one country than another? Are health sector subsidies more equally distributed in some countries than others? Are health care payments more progressive in one health care financing system than another? What are catastrophic payments and how can they be measured? How far do health care payments impoverish households? Answering questions such as these requires quantitative analysis. This in turn depends on a clear understanding of how to measure key variables in the analysis, such as health outcomes, health expenditures, need, and living standards. It also requires set quantitative methods for measuring inequality and inequity, progressivity, catastrophic expenditures, poverty impact, and so on. This book provides an overview of the key issues that arise in the measurement of health variables and living standards, outlines and explains essential tools and methods for distributional analysis, and, using worked examples, shows how these tools and methods can be applied in the health sector. The book seeks to provide the reader with both a solid grasp of the principles underpinning distributional analysis, while at the same time offering hands-on guidance on how to move from principles to practice.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Data for Health Equity Analysis: Requirements, Sources, and Sample Design
• 3 Health Outcome #1: Child Survival
• 4 Health Outcome #2: Anthropometrics
• 5 Health Outcome #3: Adult Health
• 6 Measurement of Living Standards
• 7 Concentration Curves
• 8 The Concentration Index
• 9 Extensions to the Concentration Index: Inequality Aversion and the Health Achievement Index
• 10 Multivariate Analysis of Health Survey Data
• 11 Nonlinear Models for Health and Medical Expenditure Data
• 12 Explaining Differences between Groups: Oaxaca Decomposition
• 13 Explaining Socioeconomic-Related Health Inequality: Decomposition of the Concentration Index
• 14 Who Benefits from Health Sector Subsidies? Benefit Incidence Analysis
• 15 Measuring and Explaining Inequity in Health Service Delivery
• 16 Who Pays for Health Care? Progressivity of Health Finance
• 17 Redistributive Effect of Health Finance
• 18 Catastrophic Payments for Health Care
• 19 Health Care Payments and Poverty
• Back Cover