The Measurement and Decomposition Analysis of Inequality of Opportunity in China’s Educational Outcomes

Zhang Jie ()
Additional contact information
Zhang Jie: School of Economics, Chongqing Technology and Business University, Chongqing, China

Economics - The Open-Access, Open-Assessment Journal, 2025, vol. 19, issue 1, 23

Abstract: This paper uses China’s Census data from 1982 to 2005 to measure and decompose the degree of inequality in educational opportunity (IOE). We apply the parameter estimation method from an ex-ante perspective and the Shapley value decomposition method to calculate the contribution of “circumstances” factors to inequality of opportunity in educational outcomes. Our results indicate that China’s educational inequality showed a significant downward trend during the study period, which can be attributed to a notable reduction in the inequality of educational opportunity. We also observe considerable heterogeneity in China’s educational opportunity inequality across gender, region, and birth cohort subsamples. The main contributors to the inequality of opportunity for Chinese individuals concerning their educational outcomes are the individual’s age, the parents’ education in the family, and the hukou system.

Keywords: educational inequality; inequality of opportunity; shapely decomposition; China (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1515/econ-2025-0152 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bpj:econoa:v:19:y:2025:i:1:p:23:n:1004

DOI: 10.1515/econ-2025-0152

Access Statistics for this article

Economics - The Open-Access, Open-Assessment Journal is currently edited by Katharine Rockett

More articles in Economics - The Open-Access, Open-Assessment Journal from De Gruyter
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Peter Golla ().