Publication: Measuring Inequality of Opportunity with Imperfect Data : The Case of Turkey
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Date
2010-02
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2010-02
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Abstract
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 and an ancillary household expenditure survey are available. One method relies only on the demographic and health survey, and constructs a wealth index as a measure of economic advantage. The alternative method imputes consumption from the ancillary survey into the demographic and health survey. In both cases, the between-type share of overall inequality is computed as a lower bound estimator of inequality of opportunity. Parametric and non-parametric estimates are calculated for both methods, 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 percent (31 percent) of overall inequality in imputed consumption (the wealth index).
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“Gignoux, Jeremie; Ferreira, Francisco H.G.; Aran, Meltem. 2010. Measuring Inequality of Opportunity with Imperfect Data : The Case of Turkey. Policy Research Working Paper;No. 5204. © http://hdl.handle.net/10986/19918 License: CC BY 3.0 IGO.”
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