IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/qeh/ophiwp/ophiwp0039.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

A Dissimilarity Index of Multidimensional Inequality of Opportunity (Revised and Updated)

Author

Listed:
  • Gaston Yalonetzky

Abstract

A recent literature on inequality of opportunity offers quantitative tools for comparisons and measurement based on stochastic dominance criteria and traditional inequality indices. In this paper I suggest an additional way of assessing inequality of opportunity with two indices of dissimilarity across distributions. The indices are based on a traditional homogeneity test of multinomial distributions and are similar to the square coefficient of variation (Reardon and Firebaugh, 2002). Their properties are studied, as well as their usefulness and limitations in applications when both circumstances and advantages/outcomes are multidimensional. An empirical application measures changes in inequality of opportunity from an old to a young cohort in Peru. The importance of assessing the sensitivity of the results to group definitions and group proportions is highlighted.

Suggested Citation

  • Gaston Yalonetzky, 2010. "A Dissimilarity Index of Multidimensional Inequality of Opportunity (Revised and Updated)," OPHI Working Papers 39, Queen Elizabeth House, University of Oxford.
    • Handle: RePEc:qeh:ophiwp:ophiwp0039
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://ophi.org.uk/a-dissimilarity-index-of-multidimensional-inequality-of-opportunity-revised-and-updated/
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Saavedra-Chanduví, Jaime & Molinas, José R. & De Barros, Ricardo Paes & Ferreira, Francisco H. G., 2009. "Measuring Inequality of Opportunities in Latin America and the Caribbean," IDB Publications (Books), Inter-American Development Bank, number 361, December.
    2. John E. Roemer, 2014. "Economic Development as Opportunity Equalization," The World Bank Economic Review, World Bank, vol. 28(2), pages 189-209.
    3. Jean-Yves Duclos & David E. Sahn & Stephen D. Younger, 2006. "Robust Multidimensional Poverty Comparisons," Economic Journal, Royal Economic Society, vol. 116(514), pages 943-968, October.
    4. Chris Elbers & Peter Lanjouw & Johan Mistiaen & Berk Özler, 2008. "Reinterpreting between-group inequality," The Journal of Economic Inequality, Springer;Society for the Study of Economic Inequality, vol. 6(3), pages 231-245, September.
    5. Fleurbaey, Marc, 2012. "Fairness, Responsibility, and Welfare," OUP Catalogue, Oxford University Press, number 9780199653591.
    6. Arnaud Lefranc & Nicolas Pistolesi & Alain Trannoy, 2008. "Inequality Of Opportunities Vs. Inequality Of Outcomes: Are Western Societies All Alike?," Review of Income and Wealth, International Association for Research in Income and Wealth, vol. 54(4), pages 513-546, December.
    7. Checchi, Daniele & Peragine, Vito, 2005. "Regional Disparities and Inequality of Opportunity: The Case of Italy," IZA Discussion Papers 1874, Institute of Labor Economics (IZA).
    8. Jean-Yves Duclos & David Sahn & Stephen D. Younger, 2006. "Robust Multidimensional Poverty Comparisons with Discrete Indicators of Well-being," Cahiers de recherche 0628, CIRPEE.
    9. Lefranc, Arnaud & Pistolesi, Nicolas & Trannoy, Alain, 2009. "Equality of opportunity and luck: Definitions and testable conditions, with an application to income in France," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 93(11-12), pages 1189-1207, December.
    10. Amartya Sen, 1976. "Real National Income," The Review of Economic Studies, Review of Economic Studies Ltd, vol. 43(1), pages 19-39.
    11. Hutchens, Robert, 2001. "Numerical measures of segregation: desirable properties and their implications," Mathematical Social Sciences, Elsevier, vol. 42(1), pages 13-29, July.
    12. Vito Peragine, 2004. "Ranking Income Distributions According to Equality of Opportunity," The Journal of Economic Inequality, Springer;Society for the Study of Economic Inequality, vol. 2(1), pages 11-30, April.
    13. Francisco H. G. Ferreira & Jérémie Gignoux, 2011. "The Measurement Of Inequality Of Opportunity: Theory And An Application To Latin America," Review of Income and Wealth, International Association for Research in Income and Wealth, vol. 57(4), pages 622-657, December.
    14. Hild, Matthias & Voorhoeve, Alex, 2004. "Equality Of Opportunity And Opportunity Dominance," Economics and Philosophy, Cambridge University Press, vol. 20(1), pages 117-145, April.
    15. A. B. Atkinson & F. Bourguignon, 1982. "The Comparison of Multi-Dimensioned Distributions of Economic Status," The Review of Economic Studies, Review of Economic Studies Ltd, vol. 49(2), pages 183-201.
    16. Jean-Yves Duclos & David Sahn & Stephen D. Younger, 2006. "Robust Multidimensional Spatial Poverty Comparisons in Ghana, Madagascar, and Uganda," The World Bank Economic Review, World Bank, vol. 20(1), pages 91-113.
    17. Atkinson, Anthony B., 1970. "On the measurement of inequality," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 2(3), pages 244-263, September.
    18. Thomas Bossuroy & Denis Cogneau, 2008. "Social Mobility and Colonial Legacy in Five African Countries," Working Papers DT/2008/10, DIAL (Développement, Institutions et Mondialisation).
    19. Foster, James E. & Shneyerov, Artyom A., 2000. "Path Independent Inequality Measures," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 91(2), pages 199-222, April.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Saidi Anis & Hamdaoui Mekki, 2021. "Level of Fairness and Justice in Labor Market: Evidence from Tunisia Post-Revolution," Journal of the Knowledge Economy, Springer;Portland International Center for Management of Engineering and Technology (PICMET), vol. 12(3), pages 1187-1214, September.
    2. Carmen Herrero & Antonio Villar, 2013. "On the Comparison of Group Performance with Categorical Data," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 8(12), pages 1-7, December.
    3. Asadullah, M. Niaz & Yalonetzky, Gaston, 2012. "Inequality of Educational Opportunity in India: Changes Over Time and Across States," World Development, Elsevier, vol. 40(6), pages 1151-1163.
    4. Florian Wendelspiess Ch�vez Ju�rez, 2015. "Measuring Inequality of Opportunity with Latent Variables," Journal of Human Development and Capabilities, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 16(1), pages 106-121, February.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Gaston Yalonetzky, 2012. "A dissimilarity index of multidimensional inequality of opportunity," The Journal of Economic Inequality, Springer;Society for the Study of Economic Inequality, vol. 10(3), pages 343-373, September.
    2. Francisco Ferreira & Jérémie Gignoux & Meltem Aran, 2011. "Measuring inequality of opportunity with imperfect data: the case of Turkey," The Journal of Economic Inequality, Springer;Society for the Study of Economic Inequality, vol. 9(4), pages 651-680, December.
    3. Luis Fernando Gamboa & Fábio D. Waltenberg, 2011. "Inequality of opportunity in educational achievement in Latin America: Evidence from PISA 2006-2009," Working Papers 206, ECINEQ, Society for the Study of Economic Inequality.
    4. Paolo Li Donni & Vito Peragine & Giuseppe Pignataro, 2014. "Ex‐Ante And Ex‐Post Measurement Of Equality Of Opportunity In Health: A Normative Decomposition," Health Economics, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 23(2), pages 182-198, February.
    5. John E. Roemer & Alain Trannoy, 2016. "Equality of Opportunity: Theory and Measurement," Journal of Economic Literature, American Economic Association, vol. 54(4), pages 1288-1332, December.
    6. Gustavo A. Marrero & Juan Gabriel Rodríguez, 2010. "Inequality of opportunity in Europe: Economic and policy facts," Working Papers 172, ECINEQ, Society for the Study of Economic Inequality.
    7. Ferreira, Francisco H. G. & Peragine, Vito, 2015. "Equality of Opportunity: Theory and Evidence," IZA Discussion Papers 8994, Institute of Labor Economics (IZA).
    8. Aaberge, Rolf & Mogstad, Magne & Peragine, Vito, 2011. "Measuring long-term inequality of opportunity," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 95(3-4), pages 193-204, April.
    9. Vito Peragine & Flaviana Palmisano & Paolo Brunori, 2014. "Economic Growth and Equality of Opportunity," The World Bank Economic Review, World Bank, vol. 28(2), pages 247-281.
    10. Niehues, Judith & Peichl, Andreas, 2011. "Lower and Upper Bounds of Unfair Inequality: Theory and Evidence for Germany and the US," IZA Discussion Papers 5834, Institute of Labor Economics (IZA).
    11. Singh, Ashish, 2010. "Inequality of opportunity in India," MPRA Paper 32971, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    12. ANDREOLI Francesco & HAVNES Tarjei & LEFRANC Arnaud, 2014. "Equalization of opportunity: Definitions, implementable conditions and application to early-childhood policy evaluation," LISER Working Paper Series 2014-12, Luxembourg Institute of Socio-Economic Research (LISER).
    13. X. Ramos & D. Van De Gaer, 2012. "Empirical Approaches to Inequality of Opportunity: Principles, Measures, and Evidence," Working Papers of Faculty of Economics and Business Administration, Ghent University, Belgium 12/792, Ghent University, Faculty of Economics and Business Administration.
    14. Asadullah, M. Niaz & Yalonetzky, Gaston, 2012. "Inequality of Educational Opportunity in India: Changes Over Time and Across States," World Development, Elsevier, vol. 40(6), pages 1151-1163.
    15. Francesco Andreoli & Arnaud Lefranc, 2013. "Equalization of opportunity: Definitions and implementable conditions," Working Papers 310, ECINEQ, Society for the Study of Economic Inequality.
    16. Vito Peragine & Federico Biagi, 2019. "Equality of opportunity: theory, measurement and policy implications," JRC Research Reports JRC118542, Joint Research Centre.
    17. Gamboa, Luis Fernando & Waltenberg, Fábio D., 2012. "Inequality of opportunity for educational achievement in Latin America: Evidence from PISA 2006–2009," Economics of Education Review, Elsevier, vol. 31(5), pages 694-708.
    18. Monserrat Serio, 2021. "Desempeño educativo de los estudiantes en Argentina: Una mirada a la desigualdad de oportunidades del sistema educativo a partir de su medición y descomposición," Working Papers 86, Red Nacional de Investigadores en Economía (RedNIE).
    19. Christophe Muller & Asha Kannan & Roland Alcindor, 2016. "Multidimensional Poverty in Seychelles," Working Papers halshs-01264444, HAL.
    20. Marrero,Gustavo Alberto & Rodríguez,Juan Gabriel & Van Der Weide,Roy, 2021. "Does Race and Gender Inequality Impact Income Growth ?," Policy Research Working Paper Series 9865, The World Bank.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:qeh:ophiwp:ophiwp0039. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: IT Support (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/qehoxuk.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.