Monitoring Basic Opportunities throughout the Lifecycle with the Human Opportunity Index in Chile
Chile has made significant progress towards equalizing opportunities in recent years, especially those pertaining to poverty alleviation, school enrollment, and access to health services. A monitoring system of basic opportunities that effectively...
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| Format: | Other Poverty Study |
| Language: | English en_US |
| Published: |
Washington, DC
2012
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| Online Access: | http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/2012/05/16702358/monitoring-basic-opportunities-throughout-lifecycle-human-opportunity-index-chile http://hdl.handle.net/10986/11919 |
| Summary: | Chile has made significant progress
towards equalizing opportunities in recent years, especially
those pertaining to poverty alleviation, school enrollment,
and access to health services. A monitoring system of basic
opportunities that effectively incorporates equity concerns
may help policymakers to design better policies for
vulnerable groups in Chile. The Human Opportunity Index
(HOI) is an equality of opportunity adjusted coverage rate.
The HOI provides a tractable way, in a single indicator, to
measure progress toward universal coverage of opportunities
as well as equitable access to those opportunities. Along
with being a simple, intuitive and tractable measure, the
HOI also satisfies several properties deemed desirable for
an equity measure. Any increase in the amount of
opportunities will improve the HOI despite to whom it is
allocated. It is pro-vulnerable because if the coverage rate
of a vulnerable group increases holding the overall coverage
rate constant, the HOI also increases. Similarly, for a
given expansion of available services, the HOI increases
more if the extra units of services are allocated to a
vulnerable group. In general the HOI ranges from 0 to 100.
The three main findings that emerge from this initial
monitoring exercise are: (i) Chile does well in providing
fundamental basic opportunities, but not as well on more
advanced indicators such as quality learning, completion of
secondary on time, access to some tertiary education, as
well as bundles of services for early childhood development,
and youth development; (ii) inequality of opportunity in
Chile operates mainly on the basis of parental education and
location, and (iii) a sound monitoring system of the
equitable provision of opportunities for all may help the
Chilean society strengthen consensus towards equity and
provide policymakers with the right incentives to design and
implement better policies to address these issues. |
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