We are faced with a unique opportunity to not only develop policies to improve aggregate-level health indicators in Latin America but also to contribute to the alleviation of the social inequality characteristic of the continent.
The ecological design is appropriate for this specific analysis because it is a way to evaluate the RFE on the aggregate level adverse health outcomes.
These outputs were used to calculate intervention effectiveness in terms of changes in aggregate population level health outcomes.
For decisions at the aggregate level, such as health technology assessments, value sets representing the general population should be used.
For the effect at the aggregate level, the mean health-care utilisation rate of the 16 health zones was calculated 12 months prior to and 24 months following the introduction of user fee subsidisation (see Figure 2 below and the regression output in Table 4).
However, such studies examining the association between political ideology and health at the aggregate level cannot provide insights into how individuals' political ideology might be associated with their health.
In conclusion, our analysis identifies the importance of several key indicators of health system strength and functioning that are significantly associated with infant, child and maternal survival at the national aggregate level and after controlling for other health system determinants and demographic factors.
At the same time, insured consumption also then contributes to the rapid growth of health expenditure at the aggregate level [49].
However, the authors noted that spontaneous inclusion of income effects did not significantly affect health state valuations at the aggregate level.
This can be relevant to evaluating whether food environment changes at the aggregate level (i.e., policies or infrastructure) influence health.
Positive associations between social capital and health were repeatedly found on aggregate level (i.e. in ecological studies) and on individual level as well as in multilevel studies [ 19, 20].
