This paper measures high medical expenses in ten developed countries, both overall and by income and age, providing some of the best evidence to date on the extent of high medical spending across and within countries. Using comparable household-level data on out-of pocket (OOP) medical...

Health care policy seeks to ensure that citizens are protected against excessive out-of-pocket (OOP) expenses. Yet rising health care costs are pressuring private and social insurance schemes to shift toward more cost-sharing measures. This paper uses household surveys from seven countries to...

As health care costs rise, so too does the importance of assessing their incidence, and factoring these costs into measures of post-government income distribution. This paper contributes to this assessment by calculating the effect of government policy on the distribution of income by adjusting...

There is a wide agreement among poverty research community that conventional estimates of poverty (i.e., money-metric measures) do not take into account out of pocket payments of health care. Significant household health spending would overestimate total household expenditure, which results in...

Objective: This paper measures large out-of-pocket expenses by health condition, income, and elderly status, and estimates changes in them between 2010 and 2013. Data Source: The paper uses nationally-representative household survey data. Study Design: Logistic regression estimates the...

Over the last three decades, the wealth-to-income ratio (WIR) in many Western countries, particularly in Europe and North America, increased by a factor of two. This represents a defining empirical trend: a rewealthization (from the French repatrimonialisation) – or the comeback of (inherited)...

In the distributive analysis, the constant relative inequality aversion utility function is a standard tool for ethical judgements of income distributions. The sole parameter ε of this function expresses a society’s aversion to inequality. However, the profession has not committed to the...

Inequality is anisotropic: its intensity is variable along the income scale. Therefore, to focus on local inequalities, a new representation, the isograph, is developed to figure their variations. This leads to the expression of three coefficients able to summarize the shape of inequalities: a...

Social vulnerability due to insufficient income and earnings may come from many sources, both demographic and economic, in a globalizing world. This paper examines the problems of population aging, low wages, growing inequality, low work hours and insufficient social spending in Spain...

Incomes in the poorest two quintiles on average increase at the same rate as overall average incomes. This is because, in a global dataset spanning 118 countries over the past four decades, changes in the share of income of the poorest quintiles are generally small and uncorrelated with changes...