Background Visual acuity, like many other health-related problems, does not have an equal distribution in terms of socio-economic factors. We conducted this study to estimate and decompose economic inequality in presenting visual acuity using two methods and to compare their results in a population aged 40-64 years in Shahroud, Iran.   Methods: The data of 5188 participants in the first phase o...

The purpose of this study is to investigate healthcare access disparity that will cause delayed and unmet healthcare needs for the elderly, and to examine health inequality and healthcare cost burden for the elderly. To produce clear policy applications, this study adapts a modified PRECEDE-PROCEED model for framing theoretical and experimental approaches. Data were collected from a large colle...

Subjective Well-Being and Relative Deprivation: An Empirical Link This paper explores the relationship between two well-established concepts of measuring individual well-being: the concept of happiness, i.e. self-reported level of satisfaction with income and life, and relative deprivation/satisfaction, i.e. the gaps between the individual's income and the incomes of all individuals richer/poor...

Understanding socioeconomic inequalities in health care is critical for achieving health equity. The aim of this paper is threefold: 1) to quantify inequality in diabetes health care service utilization; 2) to understand determinants of these inequalities in relation to socio-demographic and clinical morbidity factors; and 3) to compare the empirical outcome of using income level and educationa...

In most statistical analysis, inequality or extent of variation in income isrepresented in terms of certain summary measures. But some authors arguedthat the concept of inequality is vague and thus cannot be measured as anexact concept. Therefore, fuzzy set theory provides naturally a useful toolfor such circumstances. In this paper we have introduced a real-valued fuzzymethod of illustrating t...

From Bottom to Top: The Entire Distribution of Market Income in Germany, 1992-2001 We analyze the distribution and concentration of market incomes in Germany in the period 1992 to 2001 on the basis of an integrated data set of individual tax returns and the German Socio-Economic Panel. The unique feature of this integrated data set is that it encompasses the whole spectrum of the population, fr...