Measuring Inequality of Opportunity with Imperfect Data: the case of Turkey

Journal article: The measurement of inequality of opportunity has hitherto not been attempted in a number of countries because of data limitations. This paper proposes two alternative approaches to circumventing the missing data problems in countries where a demographic and health survey (DHS) and an ancillary household expenditure survey are available. One method relies only on the DHS, and constructs a wealth index as a measure of economic advantage. The alternative method imputes consumption from the ancillary survey into the DHS. In both cases, we compute a lower bound estimator of the share of (ex-ante) inequality of opportunity in total inequality. Parametric and non-parametric estimates are calculated for each method, and the parametric approach is shown to yield preferable lower-bound measures. In an application to the sample of ever-married women aged 30-49 in Turkey, inequality of opportunity accounts for at least 26% (31%) of overall inequality in imputed consumption (the wealth index).

Author(s)

Francisco H.G. Ferreira, Jérémie Gignoux, Meltem Aran

Journal
  • Journal of Economic Inequality
Date of publication
  • 2011
Keywords JEL
D31 D63 J62
Keywords
  • Inequality of opportunity
  • Wealth index
  • Imputed consumption
  • Turkey
Pages
  • 651-680
Version
  • 1
Volume
  • 9