The evolution of inequality of opportunity in Europe

ABSTRACT

The paper tests whether inequality of opportunity (IO) in Europe has increased between 2004 and 2010. IO is understood as unfair inequality due to circumstances beyond individual control (such as family background, race or sex). We show that over 2004–2010 IO increased significantly in Austria, Greece and Spain, while it decreased in Poland and Portugal. Relative IO (ratio of IO to overall income inequality) has grown in Austria, Belgium, Greece and Norway. In Greece, several social groups with an immigrant background have experienced sizable declines an opportunity for income acquisition.

KEYWORDS:

• Inequality of opportunity
• income inequality
• childhood circumstances
• family background
• immigrants

JEL CLASSIFICATION:

• D63
• E24
• O52
• O15

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank a referee for very helpful suggestions. This research was supported by the Polish National Science Centre through grant no. DEC-2013/09/B/HS4/01924.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

¹ See Roemer and Trannoy (2015, 2016) for comprehensive reviews of different approaches to measure IO.

² Brunori, Hufe, and Mahler (2018) show also that another machine learning tool, conditional inference forests, perform slightly better than conditional inference trees in terms of their out-of-sample performance. However, the latter is simpler computationally and allow for an easy interpretation of the society’s opportunity structure.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Narodowe Centrum Nauki [DEC-2013/09/B/HS4/01924].