What constitutes a metropolitan health advantage?

This paper presents a methodology to construct comparable estimates of health and wealth performance for 126 metropolitan regions globally that puts spatial comparability on an equal footing with data comparability. It will be used to investigate the relationship between health and wealth performance at the metropolitan scale and to offer a method to distinguish between metropolitan regions that enjoy a health advantage from those which suffer from a health disadvantage. A metropolitan health advantage is defined as maintaining or improving on the balance between health and wealth outcomes that exists at the national level when moving to the metropolitan scale. An initial finding is that metropolitan regions with a health advantage were found to exist in national contexts with lower levels of inequality.