期刊名称:Dundee Discussion Papers in Economics / Department of Economic Studies, University of Dundee
印刷版ISSN:1473-236X
出版年度:2009
卷号:1
出版社:Dundee University
摘要:In a series of papers (Tang, Chin and Rao, 2008; and Tang, Petrie and Rao 2006 & 2007), we
have tried to improve on a mortality-based health status indicator, namely age-at-death (AAD),
and its associated health inequality indicators that measure the distribution of AAD. The main
contribution of these papers is to propose a frontier method to separate avoidable and
unavoidable mortality risks. This has facilitated the development of a new indicator of health
status, namely the Realization of Potential Life Years (RePLY). The RePLY measure is based
on the concept of a “frontier country” that, by construction, has the lowest mortality risks for
each age-sex group amongst all countries. The mortality rates of the frontier country are used
as a proxy for the unavoidable mortality rates, and the residual between the observed
mortality rates and the unavoidable mortality rates are considered as avoidable morality rates.
In this approach, however, countries at different levels of development are benchmarked
against the same frontier country without considering their heterogeneity. The main objective
of the current paper is to control for national resources in estimating (conditional) unavoidable
and avoidable mortality risks for individual countries. This allows us to construct a new
indicator of health status – Realization of Conditional Potential Life Years (RCPLY). The
paper presents empirical results from a dataset of life tables for 167 countries from the year
2000, compiled and updated by the World Health Organization. Measures of national average
health status and health inequality based on RePLY and RCPLY are presented and compared.
关键词:Mortality risk, avoidable deaths, health inequality, data envelopment analysis,
stochastic frontier analysis.