Who is doing health care right? Health-care decisions are made at the individual, corporate, and government levels. Virtually every person, corporation, and government has a different perspective on health care; these result in a wide variety of systems for managing health care. Comparing different health-care systems help us learn about approaches other than our own, which in turn help us make better decisions in designing improved systems. Here, we consider health-care systems from n = 185 countries throughout the world. As a measure of the quality of care, we use LIFEEXP, the life expectancy at birth. This dependent variable and several explanatory variables are listed in Table 1.4. From this table, you will note that although there are 185 countries consider in this study, not all countries provided information for each variable. Data not available are noted under the column “Num Miss.”The data are from the UN Human Development Report.

a. Examine the distribution of the dependent variable, LIFEEXP. Do this by making a histogram and then a qq plot, comparing the empirical to a normal distribution.

b. Take a natural log transformation and examine the distribution of this transformed variable. Has the transformation helped to symmetrize the distribution?

Table 1.4.

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Variable Description Num Standard Miss Mean Median Deviation Minimum Maximum BIRTH Births attended 7 78.25 92.00 26.42 6.00 100.00 ATTEND by skilled health personnel (%) FEMALE Legislators, 87 29.07 30.00 11.71 2.00 58.00 BOSS senior officials, and managers, % female FERTILITY Total fertility 4 3.19 2.70 1.71 0.90 7.50 rate, births per woman GDP Gross domestic 7 247.55 14.20 1,055.69 0.10 12,416.50 product, in billions of USD HEALTH 2004 health 5 718.01 297.50 1,037.01 15.00 6,096.00 EXPEND expenditure per capita, PPP in USD ILLITERATE Adult illiteracy 14 17.69 10.10 19.86 0.20 76.40 rate, % aged 15 and older PHYSICIAN Physicians, per 3 146.08 107.50 138.55 2.00 591.00 100,000 people POP 2005 population, 1 35.36 7.80 131.70 0.10 1,313.00 in millions PRIVATE 2004 private 1 2.52 2.40 1.33 0.30 8.50 HEALTH expenditure on health, % of GDP