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,...

Despite tremendous macroeconomic instability in Brazil, the country's distributions of urban income in 1976 and 1996 appear, at first glance, deceptively similar. Mean household income per capita was stagnant, with minute accumulated growth (4.3 percent) over the two decades. The Gini...

For health outcomes, is poverty destiny? The authors explore this question for life expectancy in Africa, where health outcomes are positively correlated with income, but where the link is far from uniform. The key variables associated with good health outcomes (controlling for health...

The public sector's performance in the Caribbean varies, in reducing poverty and in creating an enabling environment for growth. Barbados and the Bahamas have been the high performers, Guyana and the Dominican Republic have been sluggish, and the other Caribbean countries fall in between. In the...

The authors investigate whether micro-simulation techniques can shed light on the types of policies that should be adopted by countries wishing to meet their Millennium Development Goals. They compare two families of micro-simulations. The first family of micro-simulations decomposes required...