Equality of Opportunity and Optimal Cash and In-Kind Policies

Leonardo Gasparini and Santiago Pinto ()

CEDLAS, Working Papers from CEDLAS, Universidad Nacional de La Plata

Abstract: This paper examines the argument for public provision of certain private goods, like education and health, based on equality of opportunity by studying the utility possibility frontier of a society in which there is a concern for the distribution of these goods. A given quality of education or health services can be consumed for free in the public sector, but people can opt-out and purchase their desired quality levels in the private sector. Some of the conclusions are: (i) a pure cash transfer is optimal when the utility redistribution is either “sufficiently” small or large; (ii) if and only if both the equality-of-opportunity concern and the utility redistribution are large enough, can an in-kind program which attracts the whole population be justified; (iii) even when everybody chooses the in-kind program, it may be optimal to perform some additional utility redistribution by increasing the size of such program.

Keywords: equality of opportunity; redistribution; education; in-kind (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D3 H4 I2 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 31 pages
Date: 2005-04
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-edu, nep-pbe and nep-upt
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (13)

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Related works:
Journal Article: Equality of opportunity and optimal cash and in-kind policies (2006)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:dls:wpaper:0022

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