Inequality of Opportunity in Sub-Saharan Africa

Paolo Brunori, Flaviana Palmisano and Vito Peragine

No 08-2015, SERIES from Dipartimento di Economia e Finanza - Università degli Studi di Bari "Aldo Moro"

Abstract: In the last decades inequality of opportunity has been extensively studied by economists, on the assumption that, in addition to being normatively undesirable, it can be related to low potential for growth. In this paper we evaluate inequality of opportunity in 11 Sub-Saharan Africa countries. According to our results, the portion of total inequality which can be attributed to exogenous circumstances is between 30% and 40% for the generality of countries considered. We also find a positive association between total consumption inequality and inequality of opportunity and we study the di?erent sources of unequal opportunities. Finally, we address a number of methodological issues that typically arise when measuring inequality of opportunity with imperfect data, which is the typical case in developing countries.

Keywords: Consumption inequality; Equality of opportunity; Sub-Saharan Africa (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D63 E24 O15 O40 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 277
Date: 2015-12, Revised 2015-12
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-afr, nep-dev and nep-mac
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (10)

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Related works:
Working Paper: Inequality of opportunity in Sub-Saharan Africa (2016)
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