收入分配、医疗资源与人口健康:一个跨国研究

收入分配与人口健康的关系是一个争论已久的问题。本文在总结各种理论假说和以往实证研究的基础上,使用新的、质量较好的跨国面板数据,重新检验了收入分配与人口健康的关系。本文的分析重点有二:一是收入分配对人口健康的滞后影响;二是医疗资源在收入分配与人口健康的相关关系中所起的作用。本文的主要发现是,收入不均对人口健康的确有不利影响,但这种不利影响需要10年或更长的滞后期才能充分显现出来,这种滞后性是以往使用固定效应模型的跨国研究未能检测到收入不均与人口健康具有负相关关系的主要原因。此外,医疗资源(特别是初级医疗资源)人均拥有量对人口健康有积极作用;医疗资源有可能通过某种不可观察固定因素对收入分配与人口健康的关系发生影响。这些发现有助于澄清关于收入分配与人口健康关系的争论,对医疗政策也有重要参考价值。

Income Inequality, Health Care Resources and Population Health: A Cross-country Analysis

Cross-country analysis makes an important part of the empirical works that assess the relationship between income inequality and population health. However, previous cross-country evidence is inconsistent due to three reasons: the difference in sample and health or inequality measures; the choice of control variables; and the disposal of country fixed effects. Using new, high-quality panel data of 109 countries, this study re-examines the relationship between income inequality and population health. The status of health care resources is controlled for, while the lagged effects of income inequality are estimated in both OLS regressions and fixed-effects models.The main findings are:health care resources have significant beneficial effects on population health;the cross-national association of income inequality and population health is partly resulted from the correlation between health care resources and income inequality;the detrimental impacts of income inequality on population health need a time lag of about 10 years to become manifest. Fixed-effects analysis tends to detect a pervert association between income inequality and population health when the lagged effects of income inequality is ignored. These findings not only shed new light on the income inequality - population health nexus, but also are suggestive to policy makers.