Equity in the finance of health care
With respect to methods used, ECuity I has demonstrated:

• how the relative importance of horizontal versus vertical inequity and reranking can be examined by applying a new decomposition method to the redistributive effect of health care finance (Wagstaff and Van Doorslaer, 1997);
• how both the analysis of progressivity (Janssen, Van Doorslaer and Wagstaff, 1994) and the decomposition of redistributive effect can be used to simulate and evaluate the equity consequences of health care reform.

With respect to results, the ECuity I was able to apply these methods to:

• the redistributive effect of health care finance in 12 countries (Van Doorslaer, Wagstaff, et al., 1999);
• an analysis of trends in the progressivity of health care finance in 13 countries (Wagstaff, Van Doorslaer, et al., 1999, JHE);
• the redistributive effect of the personal income tax system (Wagstaff, Van Doorslaer, et al., 1999, JPE).

Some of the main findings were:

• that the vertical equity effect accounts for by far the largest share of any income redistributive effect of health care finance in all countries;
• that private sources of health care finance are regressive, but direct payments are more regressive (and generate more differential treatment of households on similar incomes) than private insurance payments;
• that tax financing generates the lowest degree of differential treatment of 'equals';
  that in some cases social insurance financing is more progressive than general tax financing of health care;
• that the share of private financing of health care seems to have been growing over the eighties in Europe.
  
  

Equity in the delivery of health care
With respect to methods used, ECuity I:

• provided a new - more convenient and simple - method to measure the extent of inequity in the delivery of health systems (Wagstaff and Van Doorslaer, 2000);
• developed a new statistical test for inequity in the delivery of health care (Wagstaff and Van Doorslaer, 2000).

With respect to results, ECuity I was able to apply these new measures and tests to an analysis of the health care systems of 8 countries (Wagstaff, Van Doorslaer et al., 2000). The main results were that:

• there is a tendency to find more inequity favouring the poor because of bias in need measurement;
• that this tendency is larger for inpatient care than for outpatient specialist care;
• that utilization of GP care tends to be most distributed according to self-perceived need.
  
  

Inequalities in health
With respect to methods, ECuity I has accomplished two significant advances: We developed a latent variable-based method which improves the reliability of inequality measurement in the presence of multiple-category morbidity indicators (Wagstaff and Van Doorslaer, 1994);
we devised a more accurate method for statistical inference with respect to health concentration indices (Kakwani, Wagstaff and Van Doorslaer, 1997).

With respect to results, all of these new methods were successfully applied to the analysis of income-related inequalities in health in 9 countries (Van Doorslaer, Wagstaff, et al., 1997). It was found:

• that inequalities in health favouring the rich were statistically significant in all of these countries;
• that they were larger in the US and the UK than in the other European countries;
• that they were smaller in the Scandinavian countries and the former East Germany;
• that there was a high correlation with the income inequality in these countries;
• that there was no statistical relationship with other potential determinants such as the level of health expenditure or income, or the public share of health expenditure.

These latter results have attracted a lot of attention and have been cited in several editorials in the British Medical Journal (Wilkinson,1996; Davey Smith, 1996).