Ogwang Tomson, Mwabu Germano
Department of Economics, Brock University, St. Catharines, Canada.
Department of Economics and Development Studies, University of Nairobi, Nairobi, Kenya.
Health Econ. 2025 Oct;34(10):1821-1831. doi: 10.1002/hec.70007. Epub 2025 Jun 25.
In this paper, we propose a simple Watts-type measure of catastrophic health expenditure (CHE) which is an adaptation of the classic Watts poverty measure. The appeal of the proposed measure stems from the fact that it is both additively decomposable (i.e., it provides information on the contributions of the various population subgroups of interest, e.g., as categorized by gender, race, region, etc., to the overall level of CHE), and multiplicatively decomposable (i.e., it enables identification of three key drivers of CHE, namely, CHE incidence, CHE intensity and CHE inequality). We also describe how the Watts-type CHE measure can be estimated and additively decomposed using the widely available ordinary least squares regression packages. The empirical example provided shows the policy value of the Watts-type CHE measure, which makes it a useful supplement to the Foster-Greer-Thorbecke type measures of CHE recently proposed by Ogwang and Mwabu. Temporal dynamics in the Watts-type CHE measures are also introduced.
在本文中，我们提出了一种简单的灾难性卫生支出（CHE）的瓦茨型测度方法，它是对经典瓦茨贫困测度的一种改编。所提出测度方法的吸引力源于这样一个事实，即它既可以进行加法分解（即它提供了关于不同感兴趣的人口亚组，例如按性别、种族、地区等分类的亚组，对CHE总体水平的贡献的信息），又可以进行乘法分解（即它能够识别CHE的三个关键驱动因素，即CHE发生率、CHE强度和CHE不平等）。我们还描述了如何使用广泛可用的普通最小二乘回归软件包来估计瓦茨型CHE测度并进行加法分解。所提供的实证例子展示了瓦茨型CHE测度的政策价值，这使其成为Ogwang和Mwabu最近提出的福斯特 - 格里尔 - 索贝克型CHE测度的有用补充。还介绍了瓦茨型CHE测度的时间动态。
