Multi-dimensional inequality in health: evidence from India

ABSTRACT

Estimation of multi-dimensional welfare measures are gaining popularity. Health is multi-dimensional and efforts to estimate multi-dimensional health inequality are fairly nascent. I estimate inequality in health using a normative index and decompose it into component parts. Inequality increases as health attributes become complementary. Inequalities at the state level as well as by caste and gender, are negatively associated with the level of social and economic development.

KEYWORDS:

• Multi-dimensional inequality
• health
• equity
• inefficiency

JEL CLASSIFICATION:

• D63
• I14
• I31

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Ethical approval

This article does not contain studies with human participants or animals performed by the author.

Notes

¹ A function $\psi :{\mathbb{R}}^l\to \mathbb{R}$ is Schur-concave if $\psi (t)\le \psi (Qt)$ for each $t$ in ${\mathbb{R}}^l$and each biostochastic matrix $Q$. Biostochastic matrix is a non-negative square matrix with each row and column summing to 1.

² Minimum and maximum values are calculated from each sample.

³ The decomposition’s presented in this paper are approximately additive, Bosmans, Decancq, and Ooghe (2015). By Eq. (3)(3) $f(X)=d(X)\times e(X)$(3) (Appendix B), $f(X)=d(X)\times e(X)$ which means its logarithm can be additively decomposed as $lnf(X)=lnd(X)+lne(X)$. If the value of $t$ is close to $1$ then $ln(t)\approx 1-t$ and hence $1-f(X)\approx 1-d(X)+1-e(X)$

⁴ Decancq and Ooghe (2010), Seth (2013), and Tsui (1995) provide an axiomatic characterization of the double-CES class.

Additional information

Funding

No funding was received for this research.