On the Measurement of Health Poverty in the Case of Ordinal Variables: The Case of 29 European Countries in 2009 and 2018

Abstract

This chapter examines self-assessed health (SAH) data of 29 European countries using Eurostat data for the years 2009 and 2018. It first computes the indices recently introduced by Seth and Yalonetzky (2020) and provides confidence intervals for these indices. The ranking of these countries for the year 2018 is then summarized by Hasse diagrams. The chapter then examines first- and second-order stochastic dominance, based again on the recent work of Seth and Yalonetzky. Here also bootstrap confidence intervals were computed. The ranking of the countries in 2018 is then translated again into Hasse diagrams. It appears that Hungary and Latvia are respectively the poorest and least poor countries, both in 2009 and 2018, in terms of their SAH condition. While countries like Ireland, Luxembourg, Romania and Portugal are in the poorer segment of the distribution of countries, Norway, the United Kingdom, Denmark, the Netherlands and Austria are located on the less poor portion. As expected, the Hasse diagrams show also that there are quite a few instances where some countries cannot be ranked.

Citation

Mukhopadhaya, P. and Silber, J. (2021), "On the Measurement of Health Poverty in the Case of Ordinal Variables: The Case of 29 European Countries in 2009 and 2018", Bandyopadhyay, S. (Ed.) Research on Economic Inequality: Poverty, Inequality and Shocks (Research on Economic Inequality, Vol. 29), Emerald Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 77-93. https://doi.org/10.1108/S1049-258520210000029005