Abstract:What part of the inequality observed in a particular country is due to unequal opportunities, rather than to differences in individual efforts or luck? This paper estimates a lower bound for the opportunity share of inequality in labor earnings, household income per capita and household consumption per capita in six Latin American countries. Following John Roemer, we associate inequality of opportunity with outcome differences that can be accounted for by morally irrelevant pre-determined circumstances, such as race, gender, place of birth and family background. Thus defined, unequal opportunities account for between 24% and 50% of inequality in consumption expenditure in our sample. Brazil and Central America are more opportunity-unequal than Colombia, Ecuador, or Peru. "Opportunity profiles", which identify the social groups with the most limited opportunity sets, are shown to be distinct from poverty profiles: ethnic origin and the geography of birth are markedly more important as determinants of opportunity deprivation than of outcome poverty, particularly in Brazil, Guatemala and Peru.♦ Development Research Group, The World Bank. We are grateful to

Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. Terms of use: Documents in JEL Codes: D31, D63, J62Abstract: This paper proposes a method to decompose earnings inequality into a component due to unequal opportunities and a residual term. Drawing on the distinction between 'circumstance' and 'effort' variables in John Roemer's work on equality of opportunity, we associate inequality of opportunities with the inequality attributable to circumstances which lie beyond the control of the individual -such as her family background, her race and the region where she was born. We interpret the decomposition as establishing a lower bound on the contribution of opportunities to earnings inequality. We further decompose the effect of opportunities into a direct effect on earnings and an indirect component which works through the "effort" variables. The decomposition is applied to the distributions of male and female earnings in Brazil, in 1996. While the residual term is large, observed circumstances nevertheless account for around a quarter of the value of the Theil index. Parental education is by far the most important circumstance affecting earnings, dwarfing the effects of race and place of birth.

No abstract

SummaryHoney bee pollen is considered to be a food, and national pollen standards exist in different countries such as Brazil, Bulgaria, Poland and Switzerland. It is the aim of the present work to review pollen composition and the analytical methods used for the evaluation of high quality bee pollen. Based on the experience of different countries and on the results of published research, we propose quality criteria for bee pollen, hoping that in the future they will be used as world wide bee pollen standards.

Abstract:What part of the inequality observed in a particular country is due to unequal opportunities, rather than to differences in individual efforts or luck? This paper estimates a lower bound for the opportunity share of inequality in labor earnings, household income per capita and household consumption per capita in six Latin American countries. Following John Roemer, we associate inequality of opportunity with outcome differences that can be accounted for by morally irrelevant pre-determined circumstances, such as race, gender, place of birth and family background. Thus defined, unequal opportunities account for between 24% and 50% of inequality in consumption expenditure in our sample. Brazil and Central America are more opportunity-unequal than Colombia, Ecuador, or Peru. "Opportunity profiles", which identify the social groups with the most limited opportunity sets, are shown to be distinct from poverty profiles: ethnic origin and the geography of birth are markedly more important as determinants of opportunity deprivation than of outcome poverty, particularly in Brazil, Guatemala and Peru.♦ Development Research Group, The World Bank. We are grateful to

A growing number of developing economies are providing cash transfers to poor people that require certain behaviors on their part, such as attending school or regularly visiting health care facilities. A simple ex ante methodology is proposed for evaluating such programs and used to assess the Bolsa Escola program in Brazil. The results suggest that about 60 percent of poor 10-to 15-year-olds not in school enroll in response to the program. The program reduces the incidence of poverty by only a little more than one percentage point, however, and the Gini coefficient falls just half a point. Results are better for measures more sensitive to the bottom of the distribution, but the effect is never large.During the 1990s many developing economies adopted a new type of redistribution programs. Programs such as Food for Education in Bangladesh, Bolsa Escola in Brazil, and PROGRESA (Programa de Educación, Salud y Alimentación) in Mexico are means-tested conditional cash transfer programs. As the name indicates, they share two defining features, which jointly set them apart from most other programs. First, these programs include means tests, defined in terms of a maximum household income level, above which households are not eligible to receive the benefit. 1 Second, they include a behavioral conditionality that requires that members of participating households regularly undertake some prespecified action. The most common such requirement is for children between 6 and 15 years of age to remain enrolled in and actually attend school. In Mexico's PROGRESA, additional requirements, such as obligatory pre-and postnatal visits for pregnant women or lactating mothers, apply to some households.

Do aggregate income shocks, such as those caused by macroeconomic crises or droughts, reduce child human capital? The answer to this question has important implications for public policy. If shocks reduce investments in children, they may have a long-lasting impact on poverty and its intergenerational transmission. The authors develop a simple framework to analyze the effects of aggregate economic shocks on child schooling and health. They show that the expected effects are theoretically ambiguous because of a tension between income and substitution effects. They then review the recent empirical literature on the subject. In richer countries, like the United States, child health and education outcomes are counter-cyclical: they improve during recessions. In poorer countries, mostly in Africa and low-income Asia, the outcomes are procyclical: infant mortality rises and school enrollment and nutrition fall during recessions. In the middle-income countries of Latin America, the picture is more nuanced: health outcomes are generally procyclical and education outcomes counter-cyclical. Each of these findings is consistent with the simple conceptual framework. The authors discuss possible implications for expenditure allocation. JEL codes: I30, J13, O15 Investments in children's health and education have long-term consequences. In both the United States and the United Kingdom, low levels of cognitive development in childhood, measured by a child's performance in tests administered as early as 22 months of age, have been shown to be important predictors of adult wages (Currie and Thomas 1999; Case and Paxson 2008). In developing countries, long-term panels suggest that adverse experiences in early childhood result in worse outcomes in adulthood. A well-known study in Jamaica shows that children who were stunted (had height-forage two standard deviations or more below that of a reference population) in early childhood were significantly more likely to have deficits in cognition and school achievement in adolescence

ABSTRACT