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Measuring Inequality of
 Opportunities in Latin America and the CaribbeanOver 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.
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Measuring Inequality of Opportunities in Latin America and the CaribbeanOver 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.
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Measuring Inequality of Opportunity with Imperfect Data : The Case of TurkeyThe measurement of inequality of
 opportunity has hitherto not been attempted in a number of
 countries because of data limitations. This paper proposes
 two alternative approaches to circumventing the missing data
 problems in countries where a demographic and health survey
 and an ancillary household expenditure survey are available.
 One method relies only on the demographic and health survey,
 and constructs a wealth index as a measure of economic
 advantage. The alternative method imputes consumption from
 the ancillary survey into the demographic and health survey.
 In both cases, the between-type share of overall inequality
 is computed as a lower bound estimator of inequality of
 opportunity. Parametric and non-parametric estimates are
 calculated for both methods, and the parametric approach is
 shown to yield preferable lower-bound measures. In an
 application to the sample of ever-married women aged 30-49
 in Turkey, inequality of opportunity accounts for at least
 26 percent (31 percent) of overall inequality in imputed
 consumption (the wealth index).