Study On Health Inequality Measurement And Influencing Factors Among Elderly Of China

With the development of society,the average longevity and health level of the elderly in China havegreatlyimproved.However,there are huge gap among the elderly with different socio-economic status.This problem has drawn extensive attention at home.At the point,the paper aims to study the relationship between the health inequalities and socio-economic status of the elderly in order to provide a reference for the relevant research on the problem of aging in China.First,the paper provides some definitions related to health inequality and summarizes the previous research on this subject both at home and abroad.The research data comes from ―China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study(CHARLS)‖.Through the data processing and cleaning,a total of 7795 samples of the elderly over 55 in the baseline survey in 2011 and the 2013 follow-up survey were obtained.Then the paper establishes a comprehensive index system on the basis of self-assessment health(SAD)and Activities of Daily Living(ADL).Descriptive statistics on the connection among income level,demographic characteristics and health of the aged finds that high-income,well education,urban areas and male have a significant positive effect on the health of the elderly.With further cross-over analysis,a conclusion can be taken: 1)Income level performs a bigger impact on the health of men than that of women among the aged,the health status of low-income men is significantly lower than that of women.2)the health of those with low-level education is affected most by their income level,instead,that of those with high-level education is less affected.Second,the paper conducts a macro analysis on health inequality among the aged from the perspective of regional differences.And the results indicate that the Moran’s indices of the health of Chinese elders in 2011 and 2013 were 0.3242 and 0.4774 respectively.This reflects that a significant positive aggregation effect is attributed to the imbalance of regional development,thus representing a trend of high east and low west health level.Further analysis from inter-provincial data shows that the health levels of adjacent areas are similar,with high-value and high-value areas clustered,low-value areas and low-value areas clustered,and only a few provinces show spatial negative correlation.Third,after comparing current mainstream methods of measuring health inequality,the E-index method is applied to measure the degree of health inequality in elderly.The result demonstrates that there is a remarkable pro-rich health inequality in our country,and this kind of inequality is even more serious in rural areas and low-educated elderly.Finally,the influencing factors of health are analyzed based on health regression equation.The result shows that for every unit increase in logarithmic income,the health of the elderly increased by 0.0073 at all other factors being equal.In addition,children’s education has an enormous positive effect on the health of the elderly with a coefficient of 0.0089,and the socio-economic status of children has a strong correlation with that of their parents.The dynamic decomposition of health inequality indicates that the contribution of income distribution to the change of health inequality is as high as 73.7%,with dominant position on the factors that related to health inequality of the elderly.