Economic Development as Opportunity Equalization

John Roemer

The World Bank Economic Review, 2014, vol. 28, issue 2, 189-209

Abstract: Economic development should be conceived of as the degree to which an economy has implemented an efficient and just distribution of economic resources. The ubiquitous measure of GDP per capita reflects a utilitarian conception of justice, where individual utility is defined as personal income, and social welfare is the average of utilities in a population. A more attractive conception of justice is opportunity-equalization. Here, a two-dimensional measure of economic development is proposed, based upon viewing individuals' incomes as a consequence of circumstances, effort, and policy. The first dimension is the average income level of those in the society with the most disadvantaged circumstances, and the second dimension is the degree to which total income inequality is due to differential effort, as opposed to differential circumstances. This pair of numbers is computed for a set of 22 European countries. No country dominates all others on both dimensions. The two-dimensional measure induces a partial ordering of countries with respect to development.

Date: 2014
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (18)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/wber/lht023 (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
Working Paper: Economic Development as Opportunity Equalization (2006)
Working Paper: Economic Development as Opportunity Equalization (2006)
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:oup:wbecrv:v:28:y:2014:i:2:p:189-209.

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://academic.oup.com/journals

Access Statistics for this article

The World Bank Economic Review is currently edited by Eric Edmonds and Nina Pavcnik

More articles in The World Bank Economic Review from World Bank Oxford University Press, Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP, UK. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Oxford University Press ().