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Equality of opportunity is about leveling the playing field so that circumstances such as gender, ethnicity, place of birth, or family background do not influence a person's life chances. Success in life should depend on people's choices, effort and talents, not to their circumstances at birth. 'Measuring Inequality of Opportunities in Latin America and the Caribbean' introduces new methods for measuring inequality of opportunities and makes an assessment of its evolution in Latin America over a decade. An innovative Human Opportunity Index and other parametric and non-parametric techniques are presented for quantifying inequality based on circumstances exogenous to individual efforts. These methods are applied to gauge inequality of opportunities in access to basic services for children, learning achievement for youth, and income and consumption for adults.

Background The incomplete immunization has potentially exposed vulnerable children, especially from the socioeconomically disadvantage group, to vaccine preventable diseases. The schemes would maximize social benefit only when the immunization is effectively distributed on an equitable principle. Method The empirical study is based on unit level data from India’s National Sample Survey: “Social Consumption: Health Survey- NSS 75th Round (2017-18) database. The nationwide survey is designed on the stratified multi-stage sampling method with an objective to make the sample representative. The egalitarian equity principle requires that distribution of vaccine should be based on health needs of children, irrespective of their socioeconomic and regional factors and the principle is broadly based on two aspects - horizontal and vertical equity. The horizontal inequity (HI) is a direct form of injustice, when children with equal needs of routine immunisation are treated differentially due to their socioeconomic status, while vertical inequity (VI) is indirect form of injustice when children with differential health needs and risks exposure do not receive appropriately unequal but equitable immunisation. Using Indirect Standardisation Method and Erreygers’ Corrected Concentration Index , we measure the degree of horizontal and vertical inequities , and then linearly decompose them to identify the major factors contributing towards the respective indices. Conclusion Our findings show that incomplete immunization is significantly concentrated among children belonging to poorer households. After controlling for the confounding effects of need factors, the inequity is still significantly pro-poor (i.e., horizontal inequity). The decomposition reveals that lower education, lower consumption and rural habitation are the major factors driving the corresponding inequity. Further, the differential effect of the needs between all and the target groups (at least based on education), is observed, however, is not statistically significant enough to realize inequity (i.e., no vertical inequity). Overall, the inequity is being induced via non-need factors. We further find that community health services (like a nganwadi ) have contributed towards reducing the inequity in child immunization significantly. The paper highlights the policy recommendation that the child immunisation program should target factors driving HI and need to align their distribution in terms of risks exposures.

Working women have more compulsive buying tendencies which can lead to a significant increase in their household consumption expenditures. This study investigates the effects of changes in the number of working women on household per capita consumption. We test the hypothesis that changes in the number of working women have a discernible impact on household final per capita consumption expenditures, due to their differing consumption propensities, by doing an empirical analysis based on panel data set of 36 OECD economies within the period 2000-2016. The results indicate that changes in the number of working women increase the household per capita consumption expenditures. The result also implies that age plays a significant role in working women consumption decision making and may lead to significant differences in aggregate consumption expenditure. These findings suggest the importance of understanding changes in the number of working women in planning for aggregate consumption mobilization and in the formulation of aggregate growth policies.

The objective of this paper is to test the existence of Ricardian Equivalence in Lesotho using annual data for two sample periods, 1980-2014 and 1988-2014. This proposition is important and has crucial implications for tax policy. Household consumption, government debt, government expenditure, GDP per capita, population growth and inflation are variables which are used for this analysis. The study used ARDL cointegration approach to investigate the relationship between these variables. The study found that there is long run equilibrium relationship among the variables in two sample periods. The results show that an increase in government debt or government expenditure will decrease household consumption per capita. This implies that the Ricardian Equivalence does hold for Lesotho. The results also imply that fiscal policy is an ineffective tool to stabilize the economy. Lesotho has limited fiscal flexibility, and it will be difficult or challenging to increase private consumption and economic growth, particularly during economic downturn.

Nonparametric regression methods have significant advantages compared with parametric approaches when the functional form of the relationship between the variable of interest and available covariates cannot be specified a priori. This chapter presents a review of nonparametric methods in Small Area Estimation (SAE), with a particular focus on issues that are relevant in the estimation of poverty indices. It illustrates the application of some of the reviewed methods to the estimation of the average household per‐capita consumption expenditures at the district level using data from the Living Standards Measurement Study (LSMS) in Albania. Direct estimates of household per‐capita consumption expenditure at district level suffer from lack of precision due to a large variance, particularly for districts with small sample sizes. Estimation of poverty‐related variables at fine scales is a challenging statistical problem, because sample sizes are often small and the relationships between the variables poorly captured by simple parametric models.

Semi‐parametric models have been proposed to simultaneously incorporate the spatial distribution of the study variable and the other covariate effects. Geoadditive models in particular, merge an additive model that accounts for the relationship between the variables, and a kriging model, that accounts for the spatial distribution, under the linear mixed model framework. This chapter combines the model parameters estimated using the dataset of the 2002 Living Standard Measurement Study with the 2001 Population and Housing Census covariate information and applies geoadditive small area estimation (SAE) model in order to estimate the district level mean of the household per‐capita consumption expenditure for the Republic of Albania. It discusses two possible estimators of the small area mean and describes the datasets used in the analysis and presents the empirical results. The chapter summarizes the main findings of spatial information and geoadditive small area models and discusses possible future works.

Data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics, Household Expenditure Survey for 1998/99, are used to investigate the characteristics of households with a high per capita water use in Canberra, Australia's capital city. The results indicate that higher per capita water use is a function of household size (with large households achieving economies of size by sharing water consuming resources) and household income (with wealthy individuals using more water per capita). Linking these findings to Australian Bureau of Statistics projections of shrinking household size, the authors conclude that the resultant decline in household efficiency will drive up the demand for water, unless offset by demand management policies that focus not just on consumer behaviour (e.g. water restrictions) but also on the water efficiency of housing and domestic water-using appliances.

Zaposlene žene sklonije su kompulzivnoj kupovini što može dovesti do značajnog povećanja izdataka za potrošnju kućanstava. U ovom radu istražuje se utjecaj promjene broja zaposlenih žena na potrošnju kućanstva po glavi stanovnika. Testira se hipoteza da promjena u broju zaposlenih žena ima značajan utjecaj na izdatke finalne potrošnje kućanstva per capita, zbog različitih sklonosti potrošnji, a provedena je empirijska analiza temeljena na skupu panel podataka 36 gospodarstava OECD-a u razdoblju 2000. – 2016. Rezultati pokazuju da promjena broja zaposlenih žena povećava rashode kućanstva per capita. Nadalje, rezultati impliciraju da životna dob zaposlenih žena ima vrlo značajnu ulogu u donošenju odluka o potrošnji što može dovesti do značajnih razlika u ukupnim izdacima potrošnje. Ovi rezultati ukazuju na važnost razumijevanja činjenice da promjena broja zaposlenih žena utječe i na planiranje ukupne potrošnje i formuliranje politika gospodarskog rasta.

This paper reports an experiment in 640 Indonesian villages on three approaches to target the poor: proxy means tests (PMT), where assets are used to predict consumption; community targeting, where villagers rank everyone from richest to poorest; and a hybrid. Defining poverty based on PPP$2 per capita consumption, community targeting and the hybrid perform somewhat worse in identifying the poor than PMT, though not by enough to significantly affect poverty outcomes for a typical program. Elite capture does not explain these results. Instead, communities appear to apply a different concept of poverty. Consistent with this finding, community targeting results in higher satisfaction.

Exposure to household air pollution from cooking with solid fuels in simple stoves is a major health risk. Modeling reliable estimates of solid fuel use is needed for monitoring trends and informing policy. In order to revise the disease burden attributed to household air pollution for the Global Burden of Disease 2010 project and for international reporting purposes, we estimated annual trends in the world population using solid fuels. We developed a multilevel model based on national survey data on primary cooking fuel. The proportion of households relying mainly on solid fuels for cooking has decreased from 62% (95% CI: 58, 66%) to 41% (95% CI: 37, 44%) between 1980 and 2010. Yet because of population growth, the actual number of persons exposed has remained stable at around 2.8 billion during three decades. Solid fuel use is most prevalent in Africa and Southeast Asia where > 60% of households cook with solid fuels. In other regions, primary solid fuel use ranges from 46% in the Western Pacific, to 35% in the Eastern Mediterranean and < 20% in the Americas and Europe. Multilevel modeling is a suitable technique for deriving reliable solid-fuel use estimates. Worldwide, the proportion of households cooking mainly with solid fuels is decreasing. The absolute number of persons using solid fuels, however, has remained steady globally and is increasing in some regions. Surveys require enhancement to better capture the health implications of new technologies and multiple fuel use.