The Empirical Research On Residents Health Inequality In China

Among many indicators which are usually used as measurements of human welfare, health status is a dimension most closely related to human survival condition. As the foundation of human survival and development, health is the evaluation of the economic development of a country and an important symbol of social progress. The importance of health is attracting more and more attention from each government in the world. Health equity and justice are important goals in health field. However, health inequalities widely exist both in the world and in a country.Our country is in a rapid process of industrialization and has a large population. In recent years, the extent of inequalities in income, health, education and other aspects is expanding rapidly in China. In a long term, if this situation continues to worsen, it may cause great damage to the sustainable development of economy in China. At present, the research on health and health inequality is still at the starting stage. Many issues such as the reality, origin, change of health inequalities and how to reduce health inequalities gap, and other issues need further academic exploration. This paper tries to discuss the current health inequality situation in our country, and put forward suggestions on how to reduce health inequalities.The research on the health inequality in this paper bases on the Grossman model, and uses China Health and Nutrition Survey (CHNS)2009cross data. In the first part of this paper, we introduce the research background, significance, methods, novelties and defects of this paper. The second part is the literature review. In this part, we comb and summarize basic concepts of health, health inequalities, and their metric method. We also review literatures related to health inequalities from both of theoretical aspects and empirical aspects. The summary and appraisal on present research are based on these efforts. In the third part, we introduce the Grossman model and make the theoretical analysis. In this section, we first introduce the health production model——Grossman model, and then analyze the influence factors of health capital, the relationship between health capital and health input elements. We introduce the measurement indicator of health——Quality of Well-Being index (QWB) in the end, and we will use this indicator to measure health level in the subsequent empirical studies. In the fourth part, we construct a regression model, use CHNS cross-sectional data and carry out an empirical analysis on the influence factors of the residents’ health status and health inequality factor. The results show that income, age, gender, educational level and other factors significantly affect the urban and rural residents’ health capital stock. We find that although the degree of health inequalities varies in every province, health inequalities advantageous to rich people are existing in each province. We also find that health inequalities in rural residents are more serious than in the city. In the fifth part, we summarize the results of the empirical analysis, and put forward suggestions to improve our country dwellers’ health capital.