Content area
Full text
Soc Indic Res (2010) 96:433457 DOI 10.1007/s11205-009-9486-x
Jeroen Klomp Jakob de Haan
Accepted: 3 May 2009 / Published online: 26 May 2009 The Author(s) 2009. This article is published with open access at Springerlink.com
Abstract We examined the health status of 171 countries by employing factor analysis on various national health indicators for the period 20002005 to construct two new measures on health. The rst measure is based on the health of individuals and the second on (the quality of) the health services. Our measures differ substantially from indicators used in previous studies on health and also lead to different rankings of countries. As rankings are not that informative without further information, we analyzed the distance between each country and the sample mean. Differences between countries are much more pronounced for our measure on health services than for our measure on the health of individuals. Using cluster analysis, we classied the countries in six homogenous groups.
Keywords Health Factor analysis Cluster analysis
1 Introduction
Most studies that rank countries on the basis of their health status used the life expectancy or the mortality rate as indicator of the health status of a country, thereby implicitly assuming that health is a one-dimensional concept (cf. Charlton et al. 1983; Nolte and McKee 2003, 2008). However, this is not in line with the denition of health of the WHO, according to which health is a state of complete physical, social and mental well-being, and not merely the absence of disease or inrmity. Health is a resource for everyday life, not the object of living, and is a positive concept emphasizing social and personal resources as well as physical capabilities (WHO 1946). This denition suggests that health is a multi-faceted concept.
J. Klomp (&) J. de Haan
University of Groningen, Groningen, The Netherlands e-mail: [email protected]
J. de Haan
CESifo, Munich, Germany
Measuring Health: A Multivariate Approach
123
434 J. Klomp, J. de Haan
Nowadays, there is much information available on national health. How should all this information be combined? In other words, what is the appropriate conceptual framework for measuring health (Cutler et al. 1997)? What lessons can be learned from such a framework with respect to cross-country differences in health?
In our attempt to answer these questions, we...