Measuring Inequality of Opportunities in Latin America and the Caribbean

By R. Barros, Francisco H. G. Ferreira, J. Vega, Jaime Saavedra Chanduvi, Mirela de Carvalho, Samuel Franco, Samuel Freije-Rodriguez, Jérémie Gignoux. 2009

419 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Over the past decade, faster growth and smarter social policy have reversed the trend in Latin America's poverty. Too slowly and insufficiently, but undeniably, the percentage of Latinos who are poor has at long last begun to fall. This has shifted the political and policy debates from poverty toward inequality, something to be expected in a region that exhibits the world's most regressive distribution of development outcomes such as income, land ownership, and educational achievement. This book is a breakthrough in the measurement of human opportunity. It builds sophisticated formulas to answer a rather simple question: how much influence do personal circumstances have on the access that children get to the basic services that are necessary for a productive life? Needless to say, producing a methodology to measure human opportunity, and applying it across countries in one region, is just a first step. On the one hand, technical discussions and scientific vetting will continue, and refinements will surely follow. On the other, applying the new tool to a single country will allow for adjustments that make the findings much more useful to its policy realities. And fascinating comparative lessons could be learned by measuring human opportunity in developed countries across, say, the states of the United States or the nations of Europe. But the main message this book delivers remains a powerful one: it is possible to make equity a central purpose, if not the very definition, of development. That is, perhaps, it's most important contribution.

Subfields: Safety Research, Sociology and Political Science

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Citations in the corpus

Jobs for Shared Prosperity: Time for Action in the Middle East and North Africa (2013, background): “Building on the large literature on inequality of opportunity, the dissimilarity index (D-index) offers a synthetic measure of inequality in the distribution of labor market outcomes among groups with different circumstances (see Barros et al. 2008).”
Inequality with Ordinal Data (2017, neutral): “Figure 4 presents a cross-country comparison (21)For instance, Deaton (2008) uses the average of life satisfaction, and Inglehart et al. (2008) use the index of subjective well-being: SWB=life satisfaction - 2.5 × happiness. (22)See Kuzon, Urbanchek, and McCabe (1996), Jamieson (2004).”
Commitment to Equity Assessment (CEQ): Estimating the Incidence of Social Spending, Subsidies and Taxes Handbook (2013, neutral): “ 1 For a description, applications and limitations of standard incidence analysis see, for example, Adema and Ladaique (2005), Alleyne et al. (2004), Atkinson (1983), Bergh (2005)”
A dissimilarity index of multidimensional inequality of opportunity (2010, background): “Barros et al. (2009) compile studies of inequality of opportunity in Latin America, including the advocacy of a Human Opportunity Index (the HOI).”
Inequality of Opportunity, Income Inequality and Economic Mobility: Some International Comparisons (2013, methodology): “of Generational Earnings Mobility”, IZA DP No. 1993.”
Development goals in an era of demographic change (2015, background): “Although the defi nition of “opportunities” is still being debated, most societies defi ne them as a set of basic goods and services in the early life of an individual that improve the probability of success in life, and in most cases are considered basic economic and social rights (Barros et al. 20”
Ex ante versus ex post equality of opportunity (2013, background): “Book-length collections of empirical analyses of equality of opportunity in developing countries can be found in World Bank (2006) and de Barros et al. (2009).”
Inequality of opportunity in educational achievement in Latin America: Evidence (2011, methodology): “On the other hand, GE(2) would have the opposite advantages and drawbacks (cf.”
Measuring environmental inequality (2016, background): “…is inequality of opportunity among children,” write the authors of the World Bank’s Human Opportunity Index, noting that "the idea of giving people equal opportunity early in life, whatever their socioeconomic background, is embraced across the political spectrum” (Barros et al. 2009, p. xvii).”
Equality of Opportunity: Theory and Measurement (2016, neutral): “Paes de Barros et al. (2009) is largely concerned with children. In our view, all inequality regarding children should be counted as due to circumstances, and none to effort. More specifically, children should only become responsible for their actions after an “age of consent” is reached (which may ”