Despite a recent surge in the number of studies attempting to measure inequality of opportunity in various countries, methodological differences have so far prevented meaningful international comparisons. This paper presents a comparison of ex-ante measures of inequality of economic opportunity (IEO) across 41 countries, and of the Human Opportunity Index (HOI) for 39 countries. It also examines international correlations between these indices and output per capita, income inequality, and intergenerational mobility. The analysis finds evidence of a"Kuznets curve"for inequality of opportunity, and finds that the IEO index is positively correlated with overall income inequality, and negatively with measures of intergenerational mobility, both in incomes and in years of schooling. The HOI is highly correlated with the Human Development Index, and its internal measure of inequality of opportunity yields very different country rankings from the IEO measure.

In this paper we study the relationship between wage inequality and education in 13 OECD countries over the period 1985-2005 using the Luxembourgh Income Study (LIS) data. Our results show a great deal of heterogeneity in the patterns of the rate-of-return estimates across countries. On the other hand, our results confirm the finding of a general increase in wage inequality. As for the correlation between wage premia and wage inequality, the results show a positive but weak correlation between the estimates of the education return and the Gini index and between the convexity of wage premia and wage inequality. The results show that the increase in wage inequality in the countries considered can only partially be accounted for by observable characteristics such as education and educational premia; i.e., it is largely residual in its nature.

This paper provides a normative framework for the assessment of the distributional incidence of growth. By removing the anonymity axiom, such framework is able to evaluate the individual income changes over time and the reshuffling of individuals along the income distribution that are determined by the pattern of income growth. We adopt a rank dependent social welfare function expressed in terms of initial rank and individual income change and we obtain partial and complete dominance conditions over different growth paths. These dominance conditions account for the different components determining the overall impact of growth, that is the size of growth and its vertical and horizontal incidence. We then provide an empirical application for Italy: this analysis shows the distributional impact of the recent economic crisis suffered by the Italian populaltion.

We study the difference between the ex post and the ex ante perspectives in equality of opportunity (EOp). We show that the well documented conflicts between the compensation principles and various reward principles is but an aspect of a broader conflict between ex ante and ex post perspectives. The literature that takes the goal of providing equal opportunities as the guiding principle generally considers that this is clearly implemented only when, ex post, all individuals with the same effort obtain equal success. It is easy to believe that ex ante compensation is another natural embodiment of the same idea. In this paper we show that it is not.

In 2001 the Italian tertiary education system embarked in a broad process of reform. The main novelty brought by the reform was a reduction of the length of study to get a first level degree together with the introduction of a two-years, second level, master degree. This paper aims at studying the effects of the reform in terms of fairness. To this end, we first define fairness criteria following a well developed theory of equality of opportunity, we then discuss existing inequality measures consistent with these criteria, we show their relationship, and adapt them to the educational framework. We finally employ this set of measures to show the evolution of fairness in the access to university in Italy before and after the reform. Although not all fairness measures we estimated show a higher degree of fairness after the reform, the large majority does, suggesting a positive effect of the reform under a vast range of possible definitions of fairness.

In this paper we propose a definition of fairness in education which is based onthe theory of equality of opportunity developed in the last decades in the philosophical and economic literature (Roemer,1998; Fleurbaey, 2008), we derive opportunity inequality measures based on such conceptual framework, and we use these measures to evaluate the 1999 reform of the Italian university system (the so called “3+2" reform). Looking at 1995-2004 college graduates data our estimates show an improvement in the equality of opportunity in the access to university. However, the aggregated data available for the 2005-2008 suggest that such a positive effect may vanish in the medium run.

This paper proposes a new approach to the measurement of equality of opportunity in health, based on the path independent Atkinson index of equality. The proposed decomposition is applied both to the ex-ante and the ex-post methodologies recently adopted by the literature. The approach is applied to the measurement of equality of opportunity in health using ten waves of the British Household Panel Survey. Results confirm that socioeconomic background is an important factor determining individual health in adulthood while the incidence of equality of opportunity is around one third of the overall equality according to a substantial stable pattern over years. Our findings also depict that differences in education, in social conditions and in the life style are crucial determinants of the shape of the observed health equalities in adulthood, explaining how potential differences can be derived by the combination of different circumstances.

In this paper, we introduce a new family of rank-dependent measures of inequality and social welfare consistent with the equality of opportunity (EOp) principle. The proposed framework can be used to measure long-term as well as short-term EOp, depending on whether we let permanent income or snapshots of income form the basis of the analysis. Furthermore, it allows for both an ex-ante and an ex-post approach to EOp. There is long-term ex-post inequality of opportunity if individuals who exert the same effort have different permanent incomes. In comparison, the ex-ante approach focuses on differences in the expected permanent income between groups of individuals with identical circumstances. To demonstrate the empirical relevance of a long-run perspective on EOp, we exploit a unique panel data from Norway on individuals' incomes over their working life span. This allows us to examine how well analysis of opportunity inequality based on snapshots of income approximate the results based on permanent income.

This paper studies the distribution of well-being and, specifically, the degree of poverty and deprivation in Albania, during 2002 and 2005, using Living Standard Measurement Surveys (LSMS). The distribution analysis is performed by applying both one-dimensional and multidimensional approaches, in particular to better examine the link between economic growth, inequality and poverty in Albania. Furthermore, by estimating a non-monetary indicator, as proposed by Bossert et al. (2007), and a non-linear principal component model together with a probit model, the paper focuses on the multidimensional measures of poverty to address the relationship between poverty and socio-economic factors. Our evidence shows that absolute poverty decreased from 2002 to 2005 while national relative poverty increased; economic growth reduced poverty in Albania over the observed period; and living in rural and mountain areas, being female, low educated and with large family increased the probability of suffering from deprivation.

This paper studies the cross-country differences in conventional measures of inequality of opportunity in Europe in the space of individual disposable incomes. Exploiting two recent waves of the EUSILC database reporting information on family background (2005 and 2011), we provide estimates of inequality of opportunity in about 30 European countries for two sufficiently distant data points, allowing a check of consistency for country rankings. In addition, we exploit two observations available for most of the countries to explore the relationship between many institutional dimensions and inequality of opportunity, finding evidence of negative correlation with educational expenditure (especially at the pre-primary level) and passive labour market policies.

In this paper we study the relationship between wage inequality and education in 13 OECD countries over the period 1985-2005 using the Luxembourgh Income Study (LIS) data. Our results show a great deal of heterogeneity in the patterns of the rate-of-return estimates across countries. On the other hand, our results confi rm the fi nding of a general increase in wage inequality. As for the correlation between wage premia and wage inequality, the results show a positive but weak correlation between the estimates of the education return and the Gini index and between the convexity of wage premia and wage inequality. The results show that the increase in wage inequality in the countries considered can only partially be accounted for by observable characteristics such as education and educational premia; i.e., it is largely residual in its nature.

Purpose – In this chapter we discuss to what extent some of the measures of inequality of opportunity (IOp hereafter) proposed in the literature meet the reward and the compensation principles. Methodology – We study the direct unfairness and fairness gap measures proposed by Fleurbaey and Schokkaert (2009) and the ex ante and the ex post measures proposed by Checchi and Peragine (2010). As all the measures violate at least one of the principles, we propose a framework in order to quantify, for each solution, the violations of the property that it does not fully satisfy and we formulate the problem of choosing the measure that minimizes the violations of the principle not fully satisfied. Findings – This procedure is shown to be able to rationalize some of the existing measures of opportunity inequality and to obtain new measures of IO.

In this paper we use the EU-SILC data 2005 to estimate the private rates of return to higher education in 22 European countries. By implementing a Heckman selection model and an instrumental variables estimator we study the effects of schooling on employment and wages and compare them across European countries. Our results show a great deal of heterogeneity in the rate-of-return estimates across countries. Although a clear grouping of countries does not emerges, we observe that the returns to tertiary education appear generally high for Eastern countries and low for Nordic countries whereas the Mediterranean and Continental European countries mostly exhibit an intermediate position.