Ranking populations in terms of inequality of health opportunity: A flexible latent type approach

Paolo Brunori (1, 2) , Caterina Francesca Guidi (3) , Alain Trannoy (4)

1 UniFI - Università degli Studi di Firenze = University of Florence = Université de Florence
2 Polytechnic University of Bari / Politecnico di Bari
3 UNISI - Università degli Studi di Siena = University of Siena
4 AMSE - Aix-Marseille Sciences Economiques

We offer a flexible latent type approach to rank populations according to unequal health opportunities. Building upon the latent-class method, an approch increasingly adopted to estimate health inequalities, our contribution is to let the number of socioeconomic groups considered vary to obtain an opportunity-inequality curve for a population that gives how the between-type inequality varies with the number of types. A population A is said to have less inequality of opportunity than population B if its curve is statistically below that of population B. This version of the latent class approach allows for a robust ranking of 31 European countries regarding inequality of opportunity in health.

Mots clés: health inequality; inequality of opportunity; latent class; opportunity-inequality curve; self-assessed health

Domaines: Economies et finances

Paolo Brunori, Caterina Francesca Guidi, Alain Trannoy. Ranking populations in terms of inequality of health opportunity: A flexible latent type approach. 2023. ⟨hal-03079053⟩