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Portrait of Erik Wengström. Photo.

Erik Wengström

Professor, Director of Doctoral studies, Department of Economics

Portrait of Erik Wengström. Photo.

Parameterizing standard measures of income and health inequality using choice experiments

Author

  • Hjördis Hardardottir
  • Ulf-G Gerdtham
  • Erik Wengström

Summary, in English

When measuring inequality using conventional inequality measures, ethical assumptions about distributional preferences are often implicitly made. In this paper, we ask whether the ethical assumptions underlying the concentration index for income-related health inequality and the Gini index for income inequality are supported in a representative sample of the Swedish population using an internet-based survey. We find that the median subject has preferences regarding income-related health inequality that are in line with the ethical assumptions implied by the concentration index, but put higher weight on the poor than what is implied by the Gini index of income inequality. We find that women and individuals with a poorer health status put higher weight on the poor than men and healthier individuals. Ethically flexible inequality measures, such as the s-Gini index and the extended concentration index, imply that researchers have to choose from a toolbox of infinitely many inequality indices. The results of this paper are indicative of which indices (i.e. which parameter values) reflect the views of the population regarding how inequality should be defined.

Department/s

  • EpiHealth: Epidemiology for Health
  • Department of Economics

Publishing year

2021-07-22

Language

English

Pages

2531-2546

Publication/Series

Health Economics

Volume

30

Issue

10

Document type

Journal article

Publisher

John Wiley & Sons Inc.

Topic

  • Health Care Service and Management, Health Policy and Services and Health Economy

Status

Published

ISBN/ISSN/Other

  • ISSN: 1099-1050