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We review quantitative methods for analysing the equity impacts of health care and public health interventions: who benefits most and who bears the largest burdens (opportunity costs)? Mainstream health services research focuses on effectiveness and efficiency but decision makers also need information about equity.

We review equity-informative methods of quantitative data analysis in three core areas of health services research: effectiveness analysis, cost-effectiveness analysis and performance measurement. An appendix includes further readings and resources.

Researchers seeking to analyse health equity impacts now have a practical and flexible set of methods at their disposal which builds on the standard health services research toolkit. Some of the more advanced methods require specialised skills, but basic equity-informative methods can be used by any health services researcher with appropriate skills in the three core areas.

We hope that this review will raise awareness of equity-informative methods of health services research and facilitate their entry into the mainstream so that health policymakers are routinely presented with information about who gains and who loses from their decisions.

Chicago Laser Systems (CLS) have moved to new headquarters in Des Plaines, a suburb of Chicago, near O'Hare International Airport. The new facility, comprising 52,000ft2, embodies plant and administrative functions, and has space for further growth.

In this chapter we discuss the cost-effectiveness analysis (CEA) of public health interventions where there are combined, and potentially conflicting, objectives of increasing total population health and reducing unfair health inequalities in the population. Our focus is on identifying appropriate health inequality measures in this context to quantify the impacts of interventions on unfair health inequality and, where necessary, analyse equity-efficiency trade-offs between improving total population health and reducing unfair health inequality. We recognise that this requires a number of important social value judgements to be made, and so prefer measures that facilitate transparency about these social value judgements. We briefly summarise the literature on health inequality and health-related social welfare functions, and conclude that while valuable it is not entirely suitable for our purpose. We borrow instead from the wider literature on economic inequality, highlighting how this translates to a health setting, and identify appropriate measures for CEA. We conclude with a stylised example illustrating how we would apply a battery of dominance rules and social welfare indices to evaluate the health distributions associated with two hypothetical health interventions.

Assembly & Automation (Electronics) Ltd has recently been acquired by California‐based Flextronics International Limited. Under the terms of the proposed acquisition, Flextronics International will purchase all of A&A's outstanding shares for approximately $5million, comprising $3million in cash and approximately $2million in Flextronics Ordinary Shares.