Focused Inequality and Wellbeing Measurement for Public Policy Initiatives: Equalizing Opportunity and Levelling Up, A Spanish Example

Beyond just equalizing opportunities, ‘levelling up’, ‘inclusive growth’ and ‘no child left behind’ policy initiatives require inequality measurement from a different perspective than conventional measures provide. Whereas standard inequality measures quantify normalized aggregate distance from some centrality parameter or distribution, these imperatives demand equalization towards targets that are not necessarily a centrality parameter or distribution dependent upon the underlying egalitarian philosophy. Here, Inequality Modulated Success Indices are proposed in the face of Utilitarian, Prioritarian and Sufficientarian Imperatives. The techniques meet the challenges of both continuously measured and ordered categorical environments and are exemplified in a study of human capital acquisition in Spain over the 2009–2015 period. When such considerations are introduced in the final analysis, wellbeing improvement is no longer universally observed across the three imperatives. Whilst, under a First Order wellbeing indicator, Utilitarians and Egalitarians see an improvement in wellbeing whereas Prioritarians do not, under a second order indicator Utilitarians see an improvement whereas both Egalitarians and Prioritarians see a deterioration.