Inequality in Access to Human Resources for Health: Measurement Issues

This background paper to the World Health Report 2006 discusses the various options to allow comparative analysis of inequalities in the distribution of health workers across and within countries, using a single summary measure of this distribution. The paper first presents the scale problem of various inequality indices, then tests how sensitive a simple ratio measure of the distribution of health workers is to changes in scale. This ratio of inequality is illustrated first with the global distribution of health workers and then with the distributions within Brazil, Indonesia and Viet Nam. [from publisher]