Ranking populations in terms of Inequality of health opportunity

Working Paper 2020-515

Abstract

We offer a flexible latent type approach to rank populations according to unequal health opportunities. Building upon the latent-class method proposed by Li Donni et al. (2015), our contribution is to let the number of types 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.

Authors: Paolo Brunori, Caterina Francesca Guidi, Alain Trannoy.