A Study On Health Inequality And Its Changes In China

Since the 20 th century,the health of human society has been improved unprecedentedly with a substantial increase in life expectancy.However,improvements in health status are significantly different among people from different regions.Health inequalities between the poor and the rich persist,and the degree of inequalities is widening.Based on this background and data from China,this paper introduces the Chinese residents’ health status,health inequalities and its changes over time,investigates the causes of changes in health inequalities over time,and by the decomposition method in Wagstaff et al.(2003)estimates specific contribution of each factor considered.After that,we discuss the ways to alleviate health inequalities,mainly around whether social occupational mobility helps reduce our residents’ health inequalities.We analyze how social professional mobility affects our residents’ health and health inequalities and its mechanism of action,then estimate the explanatory power of health selection and social causation respectively.In addition,the paper also concerns the health status of rural migrant workers who have been drawing much attention from the government and many scholars.Through Blinder-Oaxaca decomposition on health disparities between rural migrant workers and urban residents,we analyzes the main factors leading to health disparities between the two groups,and measure out each factor’s degree of contribution on the health inequalities.This thesis consists of seven chapters.The first chapter is the introduction,and includes research background,literature reviews and main contents.The first section describes the background,in which data from the National Bureau of Statistics and the Ministry of Health Information Center are quoted to introduce the current status of health inequalities in China.Section II is the main significance of this paper.Section III is mainly related to the domestic and foreign literature reviews.Section IV presents the main research problems of this paper.Section V is to overview the main research contents and methods.The second chapter is intended to introduce related concepts in health and health inequalities and the corresponding measurement indicators,and describe population health and health disparities based on micro-data.There are three sections in this chapter.Section I and Section II are definitions and indices for health and health inequalities respectively.Section III is mainly comparative analysis on health status of different groups.The third chapter details the theoretical and econometric models used in this thesis,which is the theoretical and technical basis for the following research.There includes health production model,Blinder-Oaxaca decomposition,decomposition of concentration index and its changes,and diagonal reference model.Using data from Chinese Household Income Project(CHIP)in 2002 and 2007,chapter IV investigates the causes of changes in health and medical burden inequality over time and by the decomposition method in Wagstaff et al.(2003)estimates specific contribution of each factor considered.Chapter V analyzes how social professional mobility affects our residents’ health and health inequalities and its mechanism of action,then estimates the explanatory power of health selection and social causation respectively.The data used in this chapter is from China Family Panel Studies(CFPS)in 2010 and 2012.Through Blinder-Oaxaca decomposition on health disparities between rural migrant workers and urban residents in 2012,Chapter VI investigates the main factors leading to health disparities between the two groups,and measure out each factor’s degree of contribution to the health inequalities.Finally,Chapter VII is intended to sort out all conclusions in our research and put forward the corresponding policy recommendations,in order to provide valuable reference and inspiration for improving residents’ health status and lessening health inequalities in China.