Measuring and Testing for Inequity in the Delivery of Health Care

This paper compares two indices of horizontal inequity in the delivery of health care, the index proposed by Wagstaff, van Doorslaer, and Paci (1991), and another index derived in this paper. As well as discussing the computational aspects of these two indices, the paper also addresses the issue of statistical inference, comparing two estimators for the standard error of each index. The paper contains an empirical illustration of both sets of methods using data from the 1992 Dutch Health Interview Survey.