According to the catastrophic health expenditure methodology a household is in catastrophe if its health out-of-pocket budget share exceeds a critical threshold. We develop a conceptual framework for addressing three questions in relation to this methodology, namely: 1. Can a budget share be...

When health status is an ordered response variable, Allison and Foster (2004) postulate that a distribution Q exhibits more inequality than a distribution P if Q isobtained from P via a sequence of median preserving spreads. This paper introduces aparametric family of inequality indices which...