We discuss the conceptual foundations of measuring (in)equity in health and health care. After an overview of the recent developments in the measurement of socioeconomic inequalities and in racial disparities, we show how these partial approaches can be seen as special cases of the more general...

Most politicians and ethical observers are not interested in pure health inequalities, as they want to distinguish between different causes of health differences. Measures of “unfair” inequality – direct unfairness and the fairness gap, but also the popular standardized concentration index...

We characterize a measure of social welfare for linear production economies in which individuals differ in productive skills and preferences. The key feature of our measure is that it aggregates fairness gaps, defined as the difference between the money-metric utility that the individual...