Health Inequality Gini Decomposition
The Gini coefficient is the most familiar single-number summary of inequality, and applied to a health variable it captures total, inter-individual health inequality — how unequally health is distributed across all people, regardless of their socioeconomic position. Its real analytic power comes from decomposition. Robert Lerman and Shlomo Yitzhaki's 1985 covariance formulation rewrites the Gini as twice the covariance between health and its rank divided by the mean, which makes it decomposable into the contributions of separate sources or components, each weighted by its share, its own Gini, and its Gini correlation with the overall distribution. The same machinery supports a between-versus-within-group split. As Wagstaff and van Doorslaer's review of health-inequality measurement explains, this 'pure' inequality view complements socioeconomic measures like the concentration index: the Gini asks how unequal health is, while the concentration index asks how that inequality is patterned by income or rank.
Source record
Citations copied verbatim from the method’s source record. No claim-level verification is inferred from them.
- Lerman, R. I., & Yitzhaki, S. (1985). Income inequality effects by income source: A new approach and applications to the United States. The Review of Economics and Statistics, 67(1), 151-156. · DOI 10.2307/1928447
- Wagstaff, A., & van Doorslaer, E. (2000). Income inequality and health: What does the literature tell us? Annual Review of Public Health, 21, 543-567. · DOI 10.1146/annurev.publhealth.21.1.543
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Related methods
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