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Health and Quality of Life Outcomes
Published in: Health and Quality of Life Outcomes 1/2017

Open Access 01-12-2017 | Research

On measuring and decomposing inequality of opportunity in access to health services among Tunisian children: a new approach for public policy

Authors: Anis Saidi, Mekki Hamdaoui

Published in: Health and Quality of Life Outcomes | Issue 1/2017

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Abstract

Background

The early years in children’s life are the key to physical, cognitive-language, and, socio-emotional skills development. So, it is of paramount importance in this period to be interested in different indicators that would influence the child’s health.

Methods

This paper measures inequality of opportunities among Tunisian children concerning access to nutritional and healthy services using Human Opportunity-Index and Shapely decomposition methods.

Results

Many disparities between regions have been detected since 1982 until 2012. Tunisian children face unequal opportunities to develop in terms of health, nutrition, cognitive, social, and emotional development. Likewise, we found that, parents’ education, wealth, age of household head and geographic factors as key factors determining child development outcomes.

Conclusion

Our findings suggested that childhood unequal opportunities in Tunisia are explained by pension funds deficiency and structural problem in the labor market.

Trial registration

The results of a health care intervention on human participants “retrospectively registered”.
Appendix
Available only for authorised users
Footnotes
1
In 2006, WHO published growth standards for weight and height to replace the 1977 National Center of Health Statistics (NCHS).
 
2
Chantreuil and Trannoy [28] and Sastre et Trannoy [29] applied Shapley decomposition methodology to explain only income inequality but Shorrocks [13] has shown that such a decomposition could be applied to any function.
 
3
Each of the three indicators of nutritional status can be expressed in units of standard deviations (reduced deviation) from the median of the reference population. The reference population used in this paper is based on the WHO growth standards. http://​www.​who.​int/​childgrowth/​standards/​second_​set/​technical_​report_​2.​pdf. (Table A.3; A.4 and A.5 in appendix)
 
4
When P-Value is less than 5% we can reject the null hypothesis meaning that the coefficient is not significant. So, we accept alternative hypothesis which means that the variable is statistically significant in explaining dependent variable.
 
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Metadata
Title
On measuring and decomposing inequality of opportunity in access to health services among Tunisian children: a new approach for public policy
Authors
Anis Saidi
Mekki Hamdaoui
Publication date
01-12-2017
Publisher
BioMed Central
Published in
Health and Quality of Life Outcomes / Issue 1/2017
Electronic ISSN: 1477-7525
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1186/s12955-017-0777-7

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