Inequality of Opportunity in Income and Consumption in Egypt

Ragui Assaad (), Caroline Krafft, John Roemer and Djavad Salehi-Isfahani

No 1002, Working Papers from Economic Research Forum

Abstract: We provide in this paper measures of inequality of opportunity of wages and consumption for Egypt at different points in time from 1988 to 2012. A standard way of measuring the degree of inequality of opportunity in a society is to choose a set of circumstances – characteristics of the individual’s environment that affect his future income and are beyond his control – and to partition the population into types, where a type is the set of individuals with the same circumstances. Inequality in the outcomes of interest between types is attributable to inequality of opportunity, whereas inequality within types is attributable to effort or luck. Although measures of inequality of wage income are increasing over time in Egypt starting in 1998, the share attributable to circumstances appears to be declining steadily throughout the whole period. We attribute this decline to the fact that outcomes for the middle class are moving closer to the outcomes of the lower classes. The outcomes for the most privileged groups remain quite different. Another possible explanation is that unobserved circumstances are playing a growing role in inequality of opportunity in Egypt.

Pages: 39
Date: 2016-05, Revised 2016-05
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ara and nep-ltv
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (10)

Published by The Economic Research Forum (ERF)

Downloads: (external link)
http://erf.org.eg/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/1002.pdf (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 404 Not Found (http://erf.org.eg/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/1002.pdf [301 Moved Permanently]--> https://erf.org.eg/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/1002.pdf)
http://bit.ly/2arip87 (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:erg:wpaper:1002

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Economic Research Forum Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Namees Nabeel ().