Inequality of opportunity in daycare and preschool services in Brazil

Abstract

In this paper we measure inequality of opportunity in daycare and preschool services in Brazil. For this purpose, we construct an opportunity index that modifies the human opportunity index proposed in the literature and used in Barros et al. (2009) to measure inequality in basic opportunities in Latin America and the Caribbean. Specifically, we construct an opportunity measure that includes not only attendance but also parental choice not to enroll children in daycare or preschool, using data from a supplementary questionnaire included in the 2006 version of Pesquisa Nacional por Amostra de Domicílios (PNAD). The results show that there are large differences between our opportunity index and the human opportunity index for children aged 0-3 years old and considerably smaller differences for children aged 4-6 years old, which suggests that preschool may be closer to a basic opportunity than daycare.

Beyond Equal Rights: Equality of Opportunity in Political Participation

“…outcomes (Foguel and Veloso, 2014;Paes de Barros et al, 2008). The dissimilarity index, based on which we will present most of our results, is constructed as follows.…”

Beyond Equal Rights: Equality of Opportunity in Political Participation

“…To obtain a scalar measure of unequal opportunities, we construct a dissimilarity index that is applied in various works on equality of opportunity with discrete outcomes (Paes de Barros et al, 2009;Foguel and Veloso, 2014). The dissimilarity index, based on which we present our baseline estimates, is constructed as follows.…”

Measurement of inequality of opportunity based on counterfactuals

“…When the outcome of interest is binary or categorical, nonlinear probability models are commonly used. Foguel and Veloso (2014) and Trannoy et al (2010), for instance, use a logit model to study inequality of access to education, and self-assessed health status, respectively, while Rosa Dias (2009) employs an ordered probit to examine self-assessed health status. For inequality in PISA scores, Ferreira and Gignoux (2014) use a simple linear specification.…”

“…inequalities due to differences in u i are legitimate), while in ( 7) and ( 9) they are treated as circumstances. 1 Counterfactual, y c1 has become the most popular; it was used, e.g., by Rosa Dias (2009), Gignoux (2011), Ferreira andGignoux (2014), Brunori et al (2012), Marrero and Rodríguez (2012), Foguel and Veloso (2014) and Niehues and Peichl (2014). Fleurbaey and Schokkaert (2009) suggest to use y c3 and y c4 .…”