Inequalities in Health and Healthcare

July 6 - 10, 2026, Online

Faculty

Owen O’Donnell is Professor of Applied Economics at Erasmus University Rotterdam. He is a Research Fellow of the Tinbergen Institute, Netspar and the CESR/Schaefer Center for the Study of Health Inequality.

Tom Van Ourti is Professor of Applied Health Economics with a focus on health and inequality at the Erasmus University Rotterdam and a Research Fellow of the Tinbergen Institute.

Meet the Lecturers

Course

Health differs markedly by education, race and income. In high-income countries, a 30-year-old male college graduate can expect to live around eight years longer than a contemporary with only compulsory schooling. Narrowing such health inequality is a primary objective of public health. Within health systems, administrators are often expected to ensure care is delivered equitably and yet health economic evaluation and population health monitoring often neglects distributional objectives.

This course will arm you with tools to measure inequality and inequity in health and health care. In addition to gaining competence in graphical analysis of health inequality and computation of inequality indices, you will consider the normative implications of the measures. You will be introduced to analysis of equity in the distribution of health care and learn how the tools of health inequality measurement can be used to make cost-effectiveness analysis and population health measurement sensitive to equity objectives.

Learning Objectives

• Measurement of absolute and relative health (care) inequality;
• Normative evaluation of health distributions;
• Decomposition of inequality indices;
• Distributional cost-effectiveness analysis;
• Equity-sensitive measurement of population health;
• Elicitation of health inequality aversion;
• Measurement of financial protection

Level

The course is targeted at economists embarking on research on population health as well as public health scientists aiming for competence in techniques used to analyze health inequality and guide policy trade-offs between the level and distribution of health.

Admission requirements

The course is open to research master’s students, PhD students, postdocs and researchers with an interest in a quantitative approach to health inequality. Students should have done an intermediate course in statistics, be familiar with regression analysis and preferably have completed an intermediate course in microeconomics. Those with a public health background who have not previously followed a course in economics should be comfortable with statistical analysis. Familiarity with the statistical package STATA is an advantage.