SEBI methodology · July 2026

Skin Economic Burden Index

SEBI is calculated for Psoriasis and Atopic Dermatitis only, across 14 countries. Vitiligo and Albinism are excluded from the index and presented as a documented research gap rather than a missing feature.

SEBI is calculated for Psoriasis and Atopic Dermatitis only. Vitiligo and Albinism are excluded — see Research Gaps.

How SEBI is Calculated

SEBI = Σ (component score × redistributed weight)

Calculated per country, per disease, on a 0–100 scale where a higher score means a higher economic burden.

Component	Original	Redistributed	Feeds from	Direction
Healthcare Cost Burden	30%	40.0%	Average of out-of-pocket health expenditure %, inverse UHC service coverage index, and disease prevalence rate	Higher = worse
Employment Penalty	25%	33.3%	ILOSTAT disability earnings penalty %	Higher = worse
Productivity Loss	20%	26.7%	IHME GBD YLDs rate, disease-specific	Higher = worse
Psychological Burden	15%	Excluded	No country-level dataset exists	Not applicable
Funding Gap	10%	Excluded	Removed — a near-duplicate of Productivity Loss (see note below)	Not applicable

Two components are excluded. Psychological Burden has no country-level dataset, and Funding Gap was removed (see below). The three remaining weights are rescaled to sum to 100% by dividing each by 0.75.

Normalisation

Each raw variable is converted to a percentile rank (0–100) relative to the other 13 countries before weighting — not min-max and not a z-score. Percentile ranking was chosen for its robustness to outliers in a small sample of 14, such as Egypt and Ghana’s anomalous disability-earnings figures and the United Arab Emirates’ missing earnings data.

The exact formula is pandas’ `series.rank(pct=True, na_option="keep") × 100`: ties take the average rank, and ranking is computed over only the countries that have the variable — so a country missing an indicator is never ranked against it and never silently imputed.

Missing Data & Confidence Tiers

A country missing one component does not have its score nulled. Weights are renormalised per country across only the components available, and every score carries a confidence tier stating how many of the three active components it was built from.

High3/3 components · 6 countriesMedium2/3 components · 8 countries

A Medium score is not directly comparable to a High score. Confidence tiers appear next to every SEBI score on this site for that reason.

Per-Country SEBI Scores

#	Country	Psoriasis	Atopic Derm.	Combined	Confidence
1	Philippines	55.0	89.3	72.1	Medium
2	China	58.6	67.1	62.9	Medium
3	United Arab Emirates	55.0	63.6	59.3	Medium
4	Germany	76.2	41.9	59.0	High
5	Brazil	53.6	62.1	57.9	Medium
6	India	49.3	66.4	57.9	Medium
7	Nigeria	46.2	69.0	57.6	High
8	Egypt	41.6	73.0	57.3	High
9	United Kingdom	63.7	49.4	56.5	High
10	Mexico	55.7	51.4	53.6	Medium
11	United States of America	64.4	38.7	51.6	High
12	Japan	72.9	30.0	51.4	Medium
13	Ghana	31.3	39.8	35.6	High
14	South Africa	40.0	27.1	33.6	Medium

Component Breakdown by Country

Country	Healthcare Cost	Employment Penalty	Productivity Loss
Philippines	67.9	—	35.7
China	54.8	—	64.3
United Arab Emirates	44.0	—	71.4
Germany	45.2	100.0	92.9
Brazil	51.2	—	57.1
India	63.1	—	28.6
Nigeria	69.0	50.0	7.1
Egypt	61.9	33.3	21.4
United Kingdom	46.4	66.7	85.7
Mexico	59.5	—	50.0
United States of America	39.3	83.3	78.6
Japan	54.8	—	100.0
Ghana	54.8	16.7	14.3
South Africa	38.1	—	42.9

Why Funding Gap Was Removed

Funding Gap was removed as a weighted SEBI component. It was defined as disease DALYs rate divided by NIH funding, but NIH funding is a single fixed figure per disease, identical for every country — dividing by a constant cannot change how countries rank, so it simply re-ranked countries by DALYs rate a second time. Because YLDs rate (which drives Productivity Loss) is already almost equal to DALYs rate for these non-fatal conditions, Funding Gap was a near-duplicate of Productivity Loss rather than an independent signal, identical in all 14 countries. NIH funding is still shown on the site as a disease-level fact — in the disease profiles and the Most Underfunded Disease panel — it was simply never valid as a per-country ranking input.

Why Vitiligo & Albinism Are Excluded

Neither Vitiligo nor Albinism has a dedicated IHME GBD cause code, so no DALYs, YLDs or disability weight exists for either condition. No structured country-level employment, healthcare-cost or productivity data exists for them in the sources used to build the index.

Reproducibility

The published component and SEBI scores in this site’s dataset are recomputed from the raw country indicators at every build and asserted to match. The build fails if any value drifts.

Known Limitations

Employment Penalty is missing for 8 of 14 countries, so their SEBI scores rely on 2 of the 3 components (Medium confidence).
NIH funding is a single global, US-only figure per disease, applied identically to every country. This is why it was removed as a SEBI component; it remains a valid disease-level fact elsewhere on the site.
Egypt and Ghana show negative disability earnings penalties (people with disabilities reporting higher earnings), most likely a small-sample artifact in the ILOSTAT breakdown rather than a data error.
Combined SEBI is the simple average of the Psoriasis and Atopic Dermatitis scores — equal disease weighting, not prevalence-weighted.
Scores built on fewer components (Medium tier) should not be read as directly comparable in precision to High-tier scores.