Measuring Inequality of
Opportunities in Latin America and the Caribbean

Over the past decade, faster growth and
smarter social policy have reversed the trend in Latin
America's poverty. Too slowly and insufficiently, but
undeniably, the percentage of Latinos who are poor has at
long last begun to fall. This has shifted the political and
policy debates from poverty toward inequality, something to
be expected in a region that exhibits the world's most
regressive distribution of development outcomes such as
income, land ownership, and educational achievement. This
book is a breakthrough in the measurement of human
opportunity. It builds sophisticated formulas to answer a
rather simple question: how much influence do personal
circumstances have on the access that children get to the
basic services that are necessary for a productive life?
Needless to say, producing a methodology to measure human
opportunity, and applying it across countries in one region,
is just a first step. On the one hand, technical discussions
and scientific vetting will continue, and refinements will
surely follow. On the other, applying the new tool to a
single country will allow for adjustments that make the
findings much more useful to its policy realities. And
fascinating comparative lessons could be learned by
measuring human opportunity in developed countries across,
say, the states of the United States or the nations of
Europe. But the main message this book delivers remains a
powerful one: it is possible to make equity a central
purpose, if not the very definition, of development. That
is, perhaps, it's most important contribution.