Inequality of outcomes and inequality of opportunities in Brazil

By François Bourguignon, Francisco H. G. Ferreira, M. Menéndez. 2003

132 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This paper departs from John Roemer's theory of equality of opportunities. We seek to determine what part of observed outcome inequality may be attributed to differences in observed 'circumstances', including family background, and what part is due to 'personal efforts'. We use a micro-econometric technique to simulate what the distribution of outcomes would look like if 'circumstances' were the same for everybody. This technique is applied to Brazilian data from the 1996 household survey, both for earnings and for household incomes. It is shown that observed circumstances are a major source of outcome inequality in Brazil, probably more so than in other countries for which information is available. Nevertheless, the level of inequality after observed circumstances are equalized remains very high in Brazil.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Gender Studies, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/d54d1633ed92044aec3dd3290b27a53eedd5ff0e

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Citations in the corpus

Equity, efficiency and inequality traps: A research agenda (2007, background): “[25] and by Cogneau and Gignoux, 2005, unpublished manuscript).”
The Measurement of Inequality of Opportunity: Theory and an Application to Latin America (2008, unknown): “Bourguignon et al. (2003, 2007) parametrically estimate inequality of opportunity for various cohorts in Brazil, in 1996.”
Inequality of opportunity in Italy (2010, unknown): “[4], Checchi et al.”
Unequal Opportunities and Human Capital Formation (2006, background): “The theoretical idea has been extensively developed in the literature since the work by Galor and Zeira (1993) and Banerjee and Newman (1993).”
Measuring Long-Term Inequality of Opportunity (2011, unknown): “This is essentially the approach proposed by Bourguignon et al. (2007): They first aggregate individuals in order to evaluate the opportunity set at a given time t.”
Intergenerational Mobility of Wages in Brazil (2006, methodology): “24Bourguignon et al. (2003) use a micro-econometric technique to simulate what the distribution of outcomes (earnings and household income) would be if observed circumstances (including family background) were the same for all individuals.”