Confidentiality, political sensitivity and other considerations often dictate the reporting of income inequality data by governments and other agencies in grouped format. In these cases, inequality measures, such as the Gini index, must be estimated from the grouped data rather than from the individual observations from which the grouped data are constructed. Also, grouped data, which are gener...

BACKGROUND In the transition from a planned economy to a market-oriented economy, China's state funding for health care declined and traditional coverage plans collapsed, leaving China's poor exposed to potentially ruinous health care costs. In reforming health care for the 21st century, equity in health care financing has become a major policy goal. To assess progress towards this goal, this p...

BACKGROUND Equity in health care entails payment for health services according to the capacity to pay and the receipt of benefits according to need. In Uganda, as in many African countries, although equity is extolled in government policy documents, not much is known about who pays for, and who benefits from, health services. This paper assesses both equity in the financing and distribution of ...

Financing incidence analysis (FIA) assesses how the burden of health financing is distributed in relation to household ability to pay (ATP). In a progressive financing system, poorer households contribute a smaller proportion of their ATP to finance health services compared to richer households. A system is regressive when the poor contribute proportionately more. Equitable health financing is ...

BACKGROUND China is reforming the way it finances health care as it moves towards Universal Health Coverage (UHC) after the failure of market-oriented mechanisms for health care. Improving financing equity is a major policy goal of health care system during the progression towards universal coverage. METHODS We used progressivity analysis and dominance test to evaluate the financing channels ...

INTRODUCTION Reducing inequalities in health care is one of the main challenges in all countries. In Iran as in other oil-exporting upper middle income countries, we expected to witness fewer inequalities especially in the health sector with the increase in governmental revenues. METHODS This study presents an inequalities assessment of health care expenditures in Iran. We used data from the ...

The Ghanaian National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS) was introduced to provide access to adequate health care regardless of ability to pay. By law the NHIS is mandatory but because the informal sector has to make premium payment before they are enrolled, the authorities are unable to enforce mandatory nature of the scheme. The ultimate goal of the Scheme then is to provide all residents with ac...

In a recent paper in this journal [Q. Guo, L. Gao, Distribution of individual incomes in China between1992 and2009, PhysicaA391 (2012) 5139–5145], a new family of distributions for modeling individual incomes in China was proposed. This family is the so-called Modified Gaussian (MG) distribution, which depends on two parameters. TheMGdistribution shows a satisfactory fit for the individual inco...

PURPOSE Rupture of pectoralis major (PM) occurs most commonly as a result of an indirect mechanism associated with extensive tension on a maximally contracted muscle. Patients with PM tendon ruptures, classically present a history of sudden severe pain in arm and shoulder at the time of injury. Treatment options vary from conservative to operative. In cases with total or near-total injuries, su...