Income-Related Inequality in Self-Assessments of Health Status in Shanghai

This study applies the concentration-index methodology to adult respondents of a unique household survey recently conducted in Shanghai to quantify income-related inequality in self-assessed health status and its avoidable component. Clustered random sampling was used to produce a citywide representative sample. A continuous measure of latent health was generated based on the predicted values from an ordinal probit model with the categorical response of self-assessed health status as the dependent variable. The concentration index is estimated as 0.06 and the percentage of its avoidable component is roughly 72 percent. Hence there is room for social welfare programs to intervene and reduce income-related health inequalities in Shanghai.