Measuring Inequality of Opportunity through Between-Group Inequality Components

Antonio Abatemarco ()

No 2008-11, IRISS Working Paper Series from IRISS at CEPS/INSTEAD

Abstract: Opportunity egalitarians support rich-to-poor redistribution whenever this allows for the compensation of income disparities due to non-responsible choices (circum- stances). In this paper we investigate the measurement of opportunity inequality within Roemer's (1993) pragmatic theory where equally subgroup ranked individuals are assumed to be equally responsible. Given entropy-based, deprivation-based and welfaristic inequality decomposition procedures, we show that the between-group Gini index - obtained from the two-components decomposition (Dagum 1997) - is the only between-group inequality index satisfying the Pigou-Dalton principle of transfer as reformulated for opportunity egalitarianism.

Keywords: inequality; opportunity; decomposition; measurement (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D63 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2008-11
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Published in Journal of Economic Inequality [link]

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Persistent link: http://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:irs:iriswp:2008-11

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