研究成果

Working Paper Series 2020-1 Making Socioeconomic Health Inequality Comparisons When Health Concentration Curves Intersect

Working Paper Series 2020-1 Making Socioeconomic Health Inequality Comparisons When Health Concentration Curves Intersect

The United Nations in its 2030 agenda for sustainable development launched in 2015 pro-

moted the enhancement of health equity, which requires the continuous monitoring of health

inequalities. Among the various methods adopted to compare health inequality, Makdissi

and Yazbeck (2014) developed positional stochastic dominance conditions to identify robust

ordering. To reach a conclusion, their rules require that the (generalized) health concentra-

tion curve of the dominant distribution lie above that of the dominated one. However, it is

frequently observed in practice that these curves intersect each other. Our paper proposes

new criteria to cope with this problem by allowing a relatively small violation of the condi-

tion proposed by Makdissi and Yazbeck (2014). We characterize our conditions by linking

them with some ethical constraints of the weight functions. We further provide an example

to demonstrate the usefulness of our newly-proposed method.

Keywords: positional stochastic dominance; socioeconomic health inequality; health achieve-

ment; almost stochastic dominance; sustainable development goals

JEL classication: D63; I10; I14