Avoiding Blinding to Health Status: A New Class of Health Achievement and Inequality Indices

This paper argues that health transfers from an individual at a lower rank in the health distribution to a person at a higher rank may decrease the concentration index if the former has a slightly higher income. The concentration index, being mainly focused on the socio-economic dimension of health inequality, can produce such counter-intuitive results that overlook the pure health inequality aversion of the planner. Building on Atkinson (1970), Yitzhaki (1983) and Wagstaff (2002), this paper presents a simple new class of health achievement and health inequality indices that overcomes the above mentioned problem.