Measuring Income Polarization for Twenty European Countries, 2004–13: A Shapley Growth-Redistribution Decomposition

Hervorming Sociale Regelgevin

Addressing Inequity to Achieve the Maternal and Child Health Millennium Development Goals: Looking Beyond Averages.

Inequity in access to and use of child and maternal health interventions is impeding progress towards the maternal and child health Millennium Development Goals. This study explores the potential health gains and equity impact if a set of priority interventions for mothers and under fives were scaled up to reach national universal coverage targets for MDGs in Tanzania. We used the Lives Saved Tool (LiST) to estimate potential reductions in maternal and child mortality and the number of lives saved across wealth quintiles and between rural and urban settings. High impact maternal and child health interventions were modelled for a five-year scale up, by linking intervention coverage, effectiveness and cause of mortality using data from Tanzania. Concentration curves were drawn and the concentration index estimated to measure the equity impact of the scale up. In the poorest population quintiles in Tanzania, the lives of more than twice as many mothers and under-fives were likely to be saved, compared to the richest quintile. Scaling up coverage to equal levels across quintiles would reduce inequality in maternal and child mortality from a pro rich concentration index of -0.11 (maternal) and -0.12 (children) to a more equitable concentration index of -0,03 and -0.03 respectively. In rural areas, there would likely be an eight times greater reduction in maternal deaths than in urban areas and a five times greater reduction in child deaths than in urban areas. Scaling up priority maternal and child health interventions to equal levels would potentially save far more lives in the poorest populations, and would accelerate equitable progress towards maternal and child health MDGs

Decomposing socioeconomic inequality for binary health outcomes: an improved estimation that does not vary by choice of reference group

BACKGROUND Decomposition of concentration indices yields useful information regarding the relative importance of various determinants of inequitable health outcomes. But the two estimation approaches to decomposition in current use are not suitable for binary outcomes. FINDINGS The paper compares three estimation approaches for decomposition of inequality concentration indices: Ordinary Least Squares (OLS), probit, and the Generalized Linear Model (GLM) binomial distribution and identity link. Data are from the Thai Health and Welfare Survey 2003. The OLS estimates do not take into account the binary nature of the outcome and the probit estimates depend on the choice of reference groups, whereas the GLM binomial identity approach has neither of these problems. CONCLUSIONS The GLM with binomial distribution and identity link allows the inequality decomposition model to hold, and produces valid estimates of determinants that do not vary according to choice of reference groups. This GLM approach is readily available in standard statistical packages.The study was conducted under the auspices of the overarching project "The Thai Health-Risk Transition: a National Cohort Study", funded by the Wellcome Trust UK (GR071587 MA) and the Australian National Health and Medical Research Council (268055)

On the Concept of Equity in Opportunity

Measuring the equity of opportunity in a given society is an essential ingredient in the formulation of policies and programs that promote inclusive growth. In this paper, equity of opportunity is defined and measured through the theoretical framework of the social opportunity function, a concept similar to the social welfare function. The functional and graphical distribution of opportunity is discussed through the generalized Lorenz curve and the Bonferroni curve, while complete ranking of distributions is achieved through their related numerical indices: the concentration index and the Bonferroni index of opportunity, respectively. The concepts of relative and absolute measures of equity of opportunity are then introduced and a social opportunity index that considers both the amount and distribution of opportunity is developed. These measures are used to analyze changes in the opportunities for health care and education in the Philippines from 1998 to 2007

Measuring Distributional Effects of Fiscal Reforms

The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of how to analyse the distributional effects of fiscal reforms. Thereby, distributional effects shall be differentiated by four subconcepts, i.e. 1.) the traditional concept of inequality, 2.) the rather novel concept of polarisation, 3.) the concept of progression in taxation, and 4.) the concepts of income poverty and richness. The concept of inequality and the concept of income poverty are the by far most widely applied concepts in empirical analyses, probably since they appear to be the most transparent ones in their structure as well as the most controversial ones in political affairs. However, the concepts of richness, polarisation and progression in taxation shall additionally be subject of this analysis, since they appear to be useful devices on the course of analysing cause and effect of the other two concepts

Are public and private social expenditures complementary?

Most analyses of social protection are focussed on public arrangements. However, social effort is not restricted to the public domain; all kinds of private arrangements can be substitutes to public programs. OECD-data indicate that accounting for private social benefits and the impact of the tax system on social expenditure has an equalising effect on levels of social effort across a number of countries. This suggests complementarity between public and private social expenditures. Changes in the public/private mix in social protection will, however, have distributional effects. We expect that private schemes will generate less income redistribution than public programs. In this paper we will perform an empirical analysis. Using comparative international data we analyse whether there is a relationship between public and private social expenditures, and the distribution of income. We find a negative relationship between net public social expenditures and income inequality, but a positive relationship between net private social expenditures and income inequality across countries. In fact, when we incorporate private social security expenditures, the impact of total social expenditure on the income distribution becomes statistically trivial. We conclude that changes in the public/private mix in the provision of social protection may affect the redistributive impact of the welfare state

Socioeconomic Inequity in Excessive Weight in Indonesia

Exploiting the Indonesian Family Life Survey, this paper studies the transition of socioeconomic related disparity of excess weight, including overweight and obesity, from 1993 to 2014. First, we show that the proportions of overweight and obese people in Indonesia increased rapidly during the time period and that poorer income groups exhibited the strongest growth of excess weight. Using the concentration index we find that prevalence of overweight and obesity affected increasingly poorer segments of Indonesian society. Third, decomposing the concentration index of excess weight in 2000 and 2014 for both sexes, our results suggest that most parts of the concentration index can be explained by the unequal distribution of living standards, sanitary conditions, the possession of vehicles, and home appliances. Finally, decomposing the change in the concentration index of excess weight from 2000 to 2014, we show that a large part of the change can be explained by the decrease in inequality in living standards, and improved sanitary conditions and better availability of home appliances in poorer households

Rank-based poverty measures and poverty ordering with an application to Tunisia

Using the normative approach, we develop a class of poverty measures that is function of a weighting system. Each particular weighting function corresponds to a particular social judgment. This offers the decision-maker a large selection of social preferences functions, and he can choose the one that best represents his social judgment. We also develop new concepts of a-extended TIP curves. They are used to establish the conditions of the robust and unanimous poverty ranking of our measures. These conditions are in terms of second-and higher-degree TIP dominance. Finally, we provide an empirical illustration using Tunisian data on the 2005–2010 period.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio