Opportunity bottlenecks: an empirical application

The study undertakes a first quantitative empirical application of Joseph Fishkin’stheory of opportunity bottlenecks. Taking advantage of survey data on key features ofopportunity bottlenecks in the Life in Transition survey for a large set of countries inEurope and Central Asia, the study describes the extent of instrumental bottlenecks,namely the need for personal connections to gain access to a set of key opportunities inlife, such as a good job or university education. These opportunity bottlenecks are thenshown to be relevant for people’s evaluations of job and life satisfaction, and for theiraspirations of future socio-economic mobility. Moreover, the need for, and availabilityof, informal connections are material to individual employment sector location, whethergovernment or private sector. While the availability of informal connections need notnegate the constraining effects of opportunity bottlenecks in theory, the results suggestthat in practice, informal connections fully undo the the negative effects imposed byopportunity bottlenecks.