Measuring Health: A Multivariate Approach

We examined the health status of 171 countries by employing factor analysis on various national health indicators for the period 2000–2005 to construct two new measures on health. The first measure is based on the health of individuals and the second on (the quality of) the health services. Our measures differ substantially from indicators used in previous studies on health and also lead to different rankings of countries. As rankings are not that informative without further information, we analyzed the distance between each country and the sample mean. Differences between countries are much more pronounced for our measure on health services than for our measure on the health of individuals. Using cluster analysis, we classified the countries in six homogenous groups.