Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

The measurement of health inequalities usually involves either estimating the concentration of health outcomes using an income-basedmeasure of status or applying conventional inequality-measurement tools to a non-continuous health variable. However, these approachesare problematic and ignores dierent appeoaches to status. The approach  in this paper is based on measuring inequality conditional on anindividual's position in the distribution of health outcomes. We examine  both inequality measures and country rankings using dierent status  approaches on a sample of world countries contained in the World Health Survey. We compare our results with generalised entropy measures  with equivalent parameters. We also perform regression analysis on the determinants of inequality estimates. Our ndings indicate major dierences in health inequality estimates depending on the status  approach adopted. We nd evidence that pure health inequalities varywith median health status alongside measures of government quality.