Do Pakistani Kids Have An Equal Chance? A Study of Inequality of Human Opportunities for Kids in Pakistan

This study aims to measure inequality of opportunities among kids in Pakistan at a provincial level for two sets of household data (2004-2005 and 2014-2015) from Pakistan Social and Living Standards Measurement Survey. The World Bank methodology of measuring the inequality of opportunities Human Opportunity Index (HOI) is used to measure the access to basic services in the country. In total seventeen opportunities are chosen to measure from education, health and infrastructure indicators and are adjusted for inequality caused due to exogenous factors (circumstances) of a child. The decomposition of the Dissimilarity index is obtained with the help of Shapely Decomposition. The findings of the study show that access to these basic services is inequitable and low on all Pakistan level. The HOI for all five-education indicators has deteriorated all over Pakistan and inequality in education is the worst in the province of Sindh, the reason behind this is low literacy rates of head of the household of a child. The province of Baluchistan has suffered the worst in infrastructure indicators and the state of education in the province is worrisome too. The location dummy (rural/urban), education of head of the household and income of the household were the most important circumstance variables influencing the inequitable access to the services. There is overall improvement noted in the health indicators but despite the improvement, Pakistan is long way from universal coverage of health facilities.