Measuring Health: A Multivariate Approach

We examined the health status of 171 countries by employing factor analysis on various national health indicators for the period 2000–2005 to construct two new measures on health. The first measure is based on the health of individuals and the second on (the quality of) the health services. Our measures differ substantially from indicators used in previous studies on health and also lead to different rankings of countries. As rankings are not that informative without further information, we analyzed the distance between each country and the sample mean. Differences between countries are much more pronounced for our measure on health services than for our measure on the health of individuals. Using cluster analysis, we classified the countries in six homogenous groups

Banking risk and regulation: Does one size fit all?

Using data for more than 200 banks from 21 OECD countries for the period 2002–2008, we examine the impact of bank regulation and supervision on banking risk using quantile regressions. In contrast to most previous research, we find that banking regulation and supervision has an effect on the risks of high-risk banks. However, most measures for bank regulation and supervision do not have a significant effect on low-risk banks. As banking risk and bank regulation and supervision are multi-faceted concepts, our measures for both concepts are constructed using factor analysi

Is the political system really related to health?

We analyze whether the political system and its stability are related to cross-country differences in health. We apply factor analysis on various national health indicators for a large sample of countries over the period 2000-2005 and use the outcomes of the factor analysis to construct two new health measures, i.e., the health of individuals and the quality of the health care sector. Using a cross-country structural equation model with various economic and demographic control variables, we examine the relationship between the type of regime and political stability on the one hand and health on the other. The political variables and the control variables are measured as averages over the period 1980-1999. Our results suggest that democracy has a positive relationship with the health of individuals, while regime instability has a negative relationship with the health of individuals. Government instability is negatively related to individual health via its link with the quality of the health care sector, while democracy is positively related with individual health through its link with income. Our main findings are confirmed by the results of a panel model and various sensitivity tests. (C) 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved