Healthy Ageing for All? A Health Growth Incidence Curve Approach

Abstract

We propose and apply a framework that analyses the distributional impact of episodes of overall health growth or decline. We use local smoothing to model the relationship between health outcomes and relative income rank and we introduce Health Growth Incidence Curves (HGIC) to graph the rate of change of health outcomes across the income distribution. We illustrate our framework with an analysis of the distributional dynamics of health and well-being among those aged 60–85 in the years 2004 and 2015 using pooled SHARE data for selected European countries. Overall we observe a pattern that favours individuals with higher socioeconomic status, with a pro-rich distribution of improvements in outcomes. Only cognitive capacity growth has been uniform across income groups.