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 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.

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.

Does the way in which scholars measure inequality of opportunity correspond to how people perceive it? What other factors influence individual perception of this phenomenon? To answer these questions, we must first clarify how scholars define and measure inequality of opportunity. We discuss the possi- ble mechanisms linking objective measures to subjective perception of the phenomenon, then propose a measure of perceived inequality of opportunity, and finally test our hypothesis by merging data from two sources: the European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (2011) and the Interna- tional Social Survey Programme (2009). We suggest that the prevailing perception of the degree of unequal opportunity in a large sample of respondents is only weakly correlated with its objective measure. We estimate a multilevel model considering both individual and country-level controls to explain individual perception of unequal opportunity. Our estimates suggest that the two most adopted meas- ures of inequality of opportunity have no clear role in explaining its perception. Conversely, other country-level variables and personal experiences of intergenerational social mobility are important determinants of how inequality of opportunity is perceived.