Ranking populations in terms of inequality of health opportunity: a flexible latent type approach with an application to European countries

We offer a flexible latent type approach to rank populations according to unequal health opportunities. Building upon the latent‐class method, an approch increasingly adopted to estimate health inequalities, our contribution is to let the number of socioeconomic groups considered vary to obtain an opportunity‐inequality curve for a population that gives how the between‐type inequality varies with the number of types. A population A is said to have less inequality of opportunity than population B if its curve is statistically below that of population B. This version of the latent class approach allows for a robust ranking of 31 European countries regarding inequality of opportunity in health.