published in: CESifo Economic Studies, 2006, 52 (4), 666-690
This paper presents new evidence on income-related health inequality and its development
over time in Switzerland. We employ the methods lined out in van Doorslaer and Jones
(2003) and van Doorslaer and Koolman (2004) measuring health using an interval regression
approach to compute concentration indices and decomposing inequality into its determining
factors. Nationally representative survey data for 1982, 1992, 1997 and 2002 are used to
carry out the analysis. Looking at each of the four years separately the results indicates the
usual positive relationship between income and health, but the distribution is among the least
unequal in Europe. No clear trend emerges in the evolution of the inequality indices over the
two decades. Inequality is somewhat lower in 1982 and 1992 as compared to 1997 and 2002
but the differences are not significant. The most important contributors to health inequality
are income, education and activity status, in particular retirement. Regional differences
including the widely varying health care supply, by contrast, do not exert any systematic
influence.
We use cookies to provide you with an optimal website experience. This includes cookies that are necessary for the operation of the site as well as cookies that are only used for anonymous statistical purposes, for comfort settings or to display personalized content. You can decide for yourself which categories you want to allow. Please note that based on your settings, you may not be able to use all of the site's functions.
Cookie settings
These necessary cookies are required to activate the core functionality of the website. An opt-out from these technologies is not available.
In order to further improve our offer and our website, we collect anonymous data for statistics and analyses. With the help of these cookies we can, for example, determine the number of visitors and the effect of certain pages on our website and optimize our content.