DaCHE discussion papers,
University of Southern Denmark, Dache - Danish Centre for Health Economics

Abstract: This paper investigates inequality in health both between and within different socioeconomic groups as well as over time in Denmark. We use selfreported health as a holistic measure of health. Inequalities in selfreported health are challenging to analyze due to its qualitative nature. We review the problems of using meanbased inequality measures with ordinal multileveled data and make use of two quantilebased approaches to assess health inequalities within and between groups respectively with data from “The National Health Interview Surveys” in Denmark 1994, 2000, 2005, and 2010. To assess the robustness of the results with respect to sample variation we employ a bootstrap analysis. Generally we find that age, gender, education, and, to some extent, marital status and region, influence selfreported health. We only find a clear trend over time in certain agegroups. Finally, we discuss the obtained results compared to earlier findings based on dichotomous measures of selfreported health.

Keywords: Inequality; Stochastic dominance; Self-assessed health; Median; Denmark

JEL-codes: I14

27 pages, July 1, 2012

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