Measuring Inequality of Opportunity with Imperfect Data : The Case of Turkey

The measurement of inequality of
opportunity has hitherto not been attempted in a number of
countries because of data limitations. This paper proposes
two alternative approaches to circumventing the missing data
problems in countries where a demographic and health survey
and an ancillary household expenditure survey are available.
One method relies only on the demographic and health survey,
and constructs a wealth index as a measure of economic
advantage. The alternative method imputes consumption from
the ancillary survey into the demographic and health survey.
In both cases, the between-type share of overall inequality
is computed as a lower bound estimator of inequality of
opportunity. Parametric and non-parametric estimates are
calculated for both methods, and the parametric approach is
shown to yield preferable lower-bound measures. In an
application to the sample of ever-married women aged 30-49
in Turkey, inequality of opportunity accounts for at least
26 percent (31 percent) of overall inequality in imputed
consumption (the wealth index).