New prospects in the analysis of inequalities in health: a measurement of health encompassing several dimensions of health

This paper develops an innovative method of constructing a concrete measure of health by taking into account individual health information. Using individual survey data from the 2002 IRDES Health and Health Insurance Survey, we propose a measurement of health based on the number of diseases and their respective severity level. The construction relies on a latent variable regression model explaining self-assessed health and controlling various social and health individual characteristics. We compare this construction to other methods proposed in literature for the measurement of health. Moreover, we show how the health index allows to compare distributions of health among di®erent populations and to evaluate inequalities in health in France by using stochastic dominance at first-order.