Measuring Progress Toward Basic Opportunities for All

Ricardo Paes de Barros, José R. Molinas Vega and Jaime Saavedra

Brazilian Review of Econometrics, 2010, vol. 30, issue 2

Abstract: Universal access to basic opportunities is undoubtedly a central objective of development. In this study, we propose an alternative scalar measure. In addition to being sensitive to the number of available opportunities, this new measure is also concerned with how these opportunities are allocated, and is therefore known as an equity sensitive coverage rate. The proposed measure is increasing in the overall coverage rate and decreasing in deviations from the ideal of equal opportunity. It is obtained by deducting a penalty equal to the deviation from the ideal of equal opportunity from the overall coverage rate. We show that this equity sensitive measure has several suitable properties. In particular, we demonstrate that it is consistent with both rst- and second-order stochastic dominance. As a consequence, this measure is Pareto-consistent and sensitive to improvements in the allocation of the available opportunities. According to this index, any increase in thenumber of opportunities that also leads to an increase in the average coverage rate among the most vulnerable groups would always represent a progress towards opportunities for all. In addition, we propose an estimation procedure for the index and its variance.

Date: 2010
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (11)

Downloads: (external link)
https://periodicos.fgv.br/bre/article/view/3687 (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:sbe:breart:v:30:y:2010:i:2:a:3687

Access Statistics for this article

Brazilian Review of Econometrics is currently edited by Daniel Monte

More articles in Brazilian Review of Econometrics from Sociedade Brasileira de Econometria - SBE Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Núcleo de Computação da FGV EPGE ().