The General Health Questionnaire (GHQ) is frequently used as a measure of mental well-being with those people with values below a certain threshold regarded as suffering from mental stress. Comparison of mental stress levels across populations may then be sensitive to the chosen threshold. This...

When measuring health inequality using ordinal data, analysts typically must choose between indices specifically based upon ordinal data and more standard indices using ordinal data, which has been transformed into cardinal data. This paper compares inequality rankings across a number of...

ABSTRACT To combat growing levels of obesity, health‐related taxes have been suggested with taxes on foods high in fat or sugar. Such taxes have been criticised on the basis of their regressivity and potentially adverse impact upon poverty. This paper analyses the effect of such taxes on a...

In Ireland, approximately 30% of the population receive free GP services ('medical card patients') while the remainder ('private patients') must pay for each visit. In 1989, the manner in which GPs were reimbursed by the State for their medical card patients was changed from fee-for-service to...