The Measurement of Inequality of Opportunity: Theory and an Application to Latin America

By Francisco H. G. Ferreira, Jérémie Gignoux. 2008

631 citations recorded by the source corpus.

What part of the inequality observed in a particular country is due to unequal opportunities, rather than to differences in individual efforts or luck? This paper estimates a lower bound for the opportunity share of inequality in labor earnings, household income per capita and household consumption per capita in six Latin American countries. Following John Roemer, the authors associate inequality of opportunity with outcome differences that can be accounted for by morally irrelevant pre-determined circumstances, such as race, gender, place of birth, and family background. Thus defined, unequal opportunities account for between 24 and 50 percent of inequality in consumption expenditure in the sample. Brazil and Central America are more opportunity-unequal than Colombia, Ecuador, or Peru."Opportunity profiles,"which identify the social groups with the most limited opportunity sets, are shown to be distinct from poverty profiles: ethnic origin and the geography of birth are markedly more important as determinants of opportunity deprivation than of outcome poverty, particularly in Brazil, Guatemala, and Peru.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Sociology and Political Science

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Citations in the corpus

Inequality of opportunity in educational achievement in Latin America: Evidence (2011, methodology): “…Betts and Roemer (2005) or Checchi and Peragine (2010) - in our view it is also as important to investigate inequality of opportunities in terms of educational achievement - such as in Ferreira and Gignoux (2008) -, since education is a privileged sphere when it comes to level the playing eld .”
Measuring inequality of opportunity with imperfect data: the case of Turkey (2010, neutral): “11See Foster and Shneyerov [16], Checchi and Peragine [7] and Ferreira and Gignoux [11].”
Inequality of Opportunity in Europe (2012, methodology): “The estimated IO values, then, will be a lower-bound of the true IO and will increase with the number of circumstances observed (Ferreira and Gignoux, 2011).19 Table 1 summarizes the information of the selected set of circumstances.20 In general, Nordic and Western continental countries present the…”
A dissimilarity index of multidimensional inequality of opportunity (2010, methodology): “In relation to Roemers mean-equalization proposal, Checci and Peragine (2005) and Ferreira and Gignoux (2008), develop a similar index of relative inequality of opportunity in which the contribution to total inequality due to opportunity inequality is captured by di¤erences in the mean attainment a”
Commitment to Equity Assessment (CEQ): Estimating the Incidence of Social Spending, Subsidies and Taxes Handbook (2013, background): “35 See Checchi and Peragine (2010) and Ferreira and Gignoux (2011).”
Inequality Of Opportunity And Growth (2013, background): “8 See Roemer (1993, 1996, 1998 and 2002), Van de Gaer (1993), Fleurbaey (1995 and 2008), Roemer et al. (2003), Ruiz-Castillo (2003), Peragine (2002 and 2004), Checchi and Peragine (2005), Betts and Roemer (2007), Moreno-Ternero (2007), Ooghe et al. (2007), Fleurbaey and Maniquet (2007), Bourguignon ”
Equality of Opportunity: Theory and Measurement (2016, background): “Bourguignon, Ferreira, and Menendez (2007) and Ferreira and Gignoux (2011) acknowledge that sub-decompositions into direct or indirect effects, or into the effects of individual circumstances, would be strongly affected by the presence of omitted variables.”