Abstract
Equity in relation to health and health care are extremely important and the public attaches greater importance to the achievement of equity than to efficiency (MacLachlan and Maynard 1982). Whether this is justified or not can be debated but, even if health equity is not given primary importance, it is certainly a goal that attracts strong support in many countries. This is beginning to be reflected in academic research. Recent decades have witnessed a dramatic expansion of the literature on health equity. Not only has the number of articles with the word ‘equity’ in the abstract grown rapidly, but their share of all articles published in Medline, for instance, has grown by 260 per cent in the past 25 years (O’Donnell et al. 2007b). Various factors have contributed to this development. An increased interest and awareness among international organizations, governments and non-governmental organizations worldwide is certainly one factor. But the increased availability of micro data sets and the development of new analytic methods also must have played an important role.
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van Doorslaer, E., O’Donnell, O. (2011). Measurement and Explanation of Inequality in Health and Health Care in Low-Income Settings. In: McGillivray, M., Dutta, I., Lawson, D. (eds) Health Inequality and Development. Studies in Development Economics and Policy. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230304673_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230304673_2
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