Measuring Inequality of Opportunities in Latin America and the Caribbean

Abstract

Over the past decade, faster growth and
 smarter social policy have reversed the trend in Latin
 America's poverty. Too slowly and insufficiently, but
 undeniably, the percentage of Latinos who are poor has at
 long last begun to fall. This has shifted the political and
 policy debates from poverty toward inequality, something to
 be expected in a region that exhibits the world's most
 regressive distribution of development outcomes such as
 income, land ownership, and educational achievement. This
 book is a breakthrough in the measurement of human
 opportunity. It builds sophisticated formulas to answer a
 rather simple question: how much influence do personal
 circumstances have on the access that children get to the
 basic services that are necessary for a productive life?
 Needless to say, producing a methodology to measure human
 opportunity, and applying it across countries in one region,
 is just a first step. On the one hand, technical discussions
 and scientific vetting will continue, and refinements will
 surely follow. On the other, applying the new tool to a
 single country will allow for adjustments that make the
 findings much more useful to its policy realities. And
 fascinating comparative lessons could be learned by
 measuring human opportunity in developed countries across,
 say, the states of the United States or the nations of
 Europe. But the main message this book delivers remains a
 powerful one: it is possible to make equity a central
 purpose, if not the very definition, of development. That
 is, perhaps, it's most important contribution.