Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/64146 
Authors: 
Year of Publication: 
2011
Series/Report no.: 
Working Paper No. 2011-27
Publisher: 
University of Massachusetts, Department of Economics, Amherst, MA
Abstract: 
Using cross country regressions, this paper constructs a novel distance-to-frontier metric for tracking broad socio-economic inequality (including access of the poor to health infrastructure) over time for individual countries. Given the unavailability of reliable and consistent direct measures of inequality for most poor countries, especially related to nonincome aspects of living standards, the metric developed in this paper can be used as an alternative indirect measure that is intuitive and easy to compute. To highlight its potential use, the metric is used to rank countries in terms of improvements in socio-economic inequality for the period since 1990. Notable examples of poor performance are displayed by China, Thailand, Kenya and India.
Subjects: 
life expectancy at birth
Preston regression
socio-economic inequality
JEL: 
I14
O57
I32
Document Type: 
Working Paper

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