The authors depart from John Roemer's theory of equality of opportunities. They seek to determine what part of observed outcome inequality may be attributed to differences in observed"circumstances,"including family background, and what part is due to"personal efforts."The authors use a...

The authors describe the evolution of relative wages in five Latin American countries-Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, and Mexico. They use repeated cross-sections of household surveys, and decompose the evolution of relative wages into factors associated with changes in relative supply and...

The author addresses two issues. First, how can health inequalities be measured so as to take into account policymakers'attitudes toward inequality? The Gini coefficient and the related concentration index embody one particular set of value judgments. Generalizing these indexes allows...

The authors propose a method for decomposing inequalities in the health sector into their causes, by coupling the concentration index with a regression framework. They also show how changes in inequality over time, and differences across countries, can be decomposed into the following: Changes...

This paper attempts to quantify the impact of the HIV/AIDS epidemic on social capital with cross-country data. Using data from the World Values Survey, the authors estimate reduced-form regressions of the main determinants of social capital controlling for HIV prevalence, institutional quality,...

Using Life in Transition Survey data for 27 transition countries, the findings of this paper suggest that higher life satisfaction is correlated with lesser experience of unpleasant events such as labor market shock or economic distress, mostly in the recent past. Social capital such as trust,...

Public provision of education has often been perceived as universal and egalitarian, but in reality it is not. Political pressure typically results in incidence bias in favor of the rich. The author argues that the bias in political influence resulting from extreme income inequalities is...

Growth is pro-poor if the poverty measure of interest falls. According to this definition there are three potential sources of pro-poor growth: (1) a high rate of growth of average incomes; (2) a high sensitivity of poverty to growth in average incomes; and (3) a poverty-reducing pattern of...

The"stylized fact"that distribution must get worse with economic growth in poor countries before it can get better turns out not to be a fact at all. Growth's effects on inequality can go either way and are contingent on several other factors. The authors found no sign in the new cross-country...

Most downsizing operations show high financial returns, but their economic returns depend crucially on their design. After comparing public sector employment across countries, the author analyzes the optimal design of downsizing operations from a microeconomic perspective. The author discusses...