Comparative analysis of inequality of opportunity: description versus explanation

Abstract

Explanations of changes in social, geographic, or other subgroups’ relative access to a discrete good G are not well supported by any classical measure of inequality, even by existing ‘margin-free’ indices. The purpose of this paper is to propose a method allowing analysis of generative mechanisms of inequalities. The inequality coefficient defined here permits to compare inequality in the selection process underlying observed opportunities and is independent of marginal distributions (overall access to good G and fraction of the population in the various subgroups). This coefficient offers, in general circumstances, a new interpretation for one familiar statistics of association comparing the differences in proportion of the columns of the 2 × 2 contingency table.

Keywords:

• Inequality of opportunity
• selection process
• explanation
• segregation
• joint density