Journal article
Defining and measuring health poverty
Philip Clarke, Guido Erreygers
Social Science & Medicine | PERGAMON-ELSEVIER SCIENCE LTD | Published : 2020
Abstract
Unlike other aspects of welfare (e.g. income), health has been relatively neglected when it comes to defining and measuring aspects of poverty. The aim of the paper is twofold: first we elaborate how the concept of 'health poverty' can be defined and measured, and second we apply the methodology to study health poverty in a variety of cases. The measurement of health poverty allows us to gain insights into different sorts of health deprivation in society as a whole, and in specific subgroups. We measure poverty by means of the widely adopted Foster-Greer-Thorbecke (FGT) class of indicators and apply this to three different health variables: cardiovascular risk, health status and life expecta..
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Grants
Awarded by Centre of Excellence in Population Ageing Research, Australian Research Council
Awarded by National Institute for Health Research Biomedical Research Centre at the University of Oxford
Funding Acknowledgements
The paper has been presented at the conference "Trends in inequality: social, economic and political issues" (Bologna), the HESG Winter 2019 Meeting (York), the conference "Frontiers of the Study of Social Inequality" (Sendai), the iHEA 2019 Conference (Basel), and in research seminars at the University of Bari, Loughborough University and the Melbourne Institute. This paper uses unit record data from the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) survey. The HILDA Project was initiated and is funded by the Australian Government Department of Families, Housing, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs (FaHCSIA) and is managed by the Melbourne Institute of Applied Economic and Social Research (MIAESR). The findings and views reported in this paper, however, are those of the authors and should not be attributed to either the FaHCSIA or the MIAESR. This work was partly supported by the Centre of Excellence in Population Ageing Research, Australian Research Council (CE170100005 awarded to Prof. Philip M Clarke). Prof Clarke is partly supported by a National Institute for Health Research Biomedical Research Centre at the University of Oxford (grant number NIHR-BRC-1215-20008). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.