Black-White Differences in the Economic Value of Improving Health

This article examines how differences in longevity over time and across groups add to the typical measures of economic progress and intergroup differentials. We focus on gains for and differences between groups defined both by race (black and white) and by gender, relying on willingness to pay as our measure of the economic value of gains in longevity. Measured at birth, the gains for white males between 1968 and 1998 were about $245,000 per person, while the gains for black males were far larger, about $390,000 per person. The gains for women were somewhat smaller, with white females gaining about $150,000 per person and black females gaining about $305,000 per person. Our estimates suggest that differences in income explain about 1/3 to 1/2 of the current black-white gap in longevity.