Equity, Opportunity and Health

Abstract

Using the new UK panel dataset “Understanding Society: the UK Household Longitudinal Study”, which allows embedding new biosocial data, the research explores inequality of opportunity in health within an ethical framework that is based on ‘responsibility-sensitive egalitarianism’. This framework considers that early life and other determinants can shape lifetime inequality of opportunity in health, while distinguishing between circumstances, such as the kind of school someone attended, and personal effort, which may be influenced by those circumstances, such as attitudes picked up at school. It does so by building a normative model to examine pathways from circumstances to health outcomes; by taking into account objective health measures (biomarkers) and mediating factors (cognitive abilities, lifestyles, employment, income); and by considering the distribution of health inequalities within social groups and allowing for heterogeneity in the role of circumstances across people who have different characteristics.

About the presenter

Andrew Jones is Professor of Economics at the University of York, UK, where he was Head of the Department of Economics and Related Studies between January 2011 and September 2015. He is a joint editor of Health Economics and edited the Elgar Companion to Health Economics with 50 concise chapters that review the state-of-the-art in the field. He was elected to the executive board of the International Health Economics Association (iHEA) and was chair of their Arrow Award committee. He was president-elect of the European Health Economics Association (EuHEA) 2014-16, president 2016-18 and is past-president 2018-20.

Andrew researches and publishes in the area of micro-econometrics and health economics with particular interests in the determinants of health, the economics of addiction and socioeconomic inequalities in health and health care. He has a particular interest in developing and disseminating the use of applied econometrics in health economics.