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On a new class of measures for health inequality based on ordinal data

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Abstract

In many instances, individual health statuses are self-reported on several ordinal scales. The ordinal nature of the data creates some challenging problems in the measurement of inequalities of various distributions of health statuses in a population. In this paper, we propose and discuss a class of measures of inequalities of heath status distributions based on such ordinal data. Our measures are easy to compute and have some desirable properties often required for a reasonable measure for health inequality.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of National Accounts, Beijing Normal University, Beijing, China

    Guangming Lv

  2. Department of Economics, Tulane University, New Orleans, LA, USA

    Yang Wang

  3. Department of Economics, Andrew Young School of Policy Studies, Georgia State University, Atlanta, GA, USA

    Yongsheng Xu

Authors
  1. Guangming Lv
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  2. Yang Wang
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  3. Yongsheng Xu
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Yongsheng Xu.

Additional information

We are grateful to the two anonymous referees and the Associate Editor, Buhong Zheng, for their valuable comments on and constructive suggestions to earlier versions of the paper.

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Lv, G., Wang, Y. & Xu, Y. On a new class of measures for health inequality based on ordinal data. J Econ Inequal 13, 465–477 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10888-014-9289-4

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10888-014-9289-4

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