Health Indicators, Health Systems and the Annual Report of the World Health Organization

Every year the World Health Organization (WHO) publishes an annual report that summarizes the status of public health for all UN member countries. Such report analysis aspects such as life-expectancies, health spending and the relation between spending and effectiveness within the health system in each of the member countries. This articles provides a reivew of a new time series indicator that aims at evaluating the relative performace of all health systems by clasifying these in a single ranking that takes into account all private and public aspect of the system. The ranking implies a probabilistic classification that remains highly related to measures of inequality. The article evaluates the effectiveness of the new health related Time Series measure as a way to evaluate the existing health systems of UN member countries.