Measurement of Multidimensional Inequality of Opportunity in India

In recent years, the discussion on distributional analysis for social justice has increasingly focused on inequality in opportunities and basic life chances rather than inequality in earnings. A suitable framework for analyzing equality of opportunity is that of Roemer (Theories of distributive justice. Harvard University Press, 1993) with the idea that any outcome is the fruit of aspects within individual responsibility, i.e., individual effort, and aspects beyond individual control, e.g., family background characteristics. The contribution of this paper is threefold; (i) to consider wellbeing in the work domain as a multifaceted concept and model it through a latent variable model; (ii) to estimate and analyze the inequality of opportunity (IOp) in work wellbeing in a multidimensional setting, taking into account the endogeneity of effort; and (iii) to apply the model to Indian data to estimate the shares of circumstances like religion, caste, household size, land, age, place of residence, and years of schooling, in the inequality of opportunity in work wellbeing. We also compare these shares with those obtained for a unidimensional outcome, across regions and over time.