Does Rapid and Sustained Economic Growth Lead to Convergence in Health Resources: The Case of China From 1980 to 2010

Liang, Di; Zhang, Donglan; Huang, Jiayan; Schweitzer, Stuart

Although our data are collected from officially published sources, the accuracy of the data at the provincial level is probably imperfect. One concern for the accuracy of aggregate data is patient mobility. In China, some people travel to seek better health care in other provinces. These people are not counted in the population data, as they are not local residents. However, these people usually only seek specialty care in tertiary hospitals, and thus should have little impact on the overall health indicators. Second, data for most process and outcome indicators are only available for less than 10 years, so it is difficult to determine the trend of sigma convergence during the relatively short period of time. In addition, we are aware that most health indicators in this article reflect the quantity of health resources and health service utilization, rather than the quality of care. However, available data for outcome measures are scarce. If longitudinal data at the provincial level are available, many broader outcome measures, such as all-cause mortality and causespecific mortality, should be interesting to study in the future.