Inequality of Opportunity in South Caucasus
This paper discusses equality of opportunity in Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia, with an emphasis on access to labor market opportunities. It develops an inequality of opportunity index on access to good jobs and decomposes the contributing factor...
| Main Authors: | , , |
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| Format: | Working Paper |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
World Bank, Washington, DC
2018
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/337061525706296867/Inequality-of-opportunity-in-South-Caucasus http://hdl.handle.net/10986/29838 |
| Summary: | This paper discusses equality of
opportunity in Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia, with an
emphasis on access to labor market opportunities. It
develops an inequality of opportunity index on access to
good jobs and decomposes the contributing factors in the
prevailing inequality. Then, it discusses the extent to
which inequality in accessing human capital inputs among
individuals during the early formative years may affect
access to good jobs. The main takeaways are as follows.
First, connections play an important role in obtaining
access to good jobs in the South Caucasus, highlighting the
unfairness in processes in the sub-region's labor
markets. Second, access to good jobs—defined as work for 20
hours or more a week and work under contract or with
tenure—is low in the South Caucasus in comparison with other
parts of Eastern Europe and Central Asia. Third, even among
people who have access to these jobs, the share of the total
inequality of opportunity that may be characterized as
unfair is relatively high. Armenia and Azerbaijan stand out
for the significant share of inequality in access to good
jobs associated with gender differences. Fourth, the
analysis on access to education and basic human capital
inputs in the earlier, formative stages of life shows that
learning performance in the South Caucasus tends to be poor
and unequal across the life circumstances of children.
Nonetheless, the coverage rates of basic human capital
inputs are generally high; the relatively narrow
inequalities arise mostly from spatial disparities. These
results indicate that addressing the deep structural
inequalities shaping the landscape of opportunity in the
South Caucasus must be a key consideration in any strategy
to share prosperity sustainably. |
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