Equality of Human Opportunities in the Middle East and North Africa

Djavad Salehi-Isfahani and Atiyeh Vahidmanesh

Abstract
 We present estimates of the Human Opportunity Index (HOI) for 10 countries in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) using harmonized household expenditure and income surveys. The index measures equality of opportunity in access to basic services (electricity, piped water, sanitation and basic education) by children. MENA governments play a large role in provision of these services, so how equitably they are provided determines the life chances of MENA children and overall equality of opportunity in these countries. We find that HOI levels in MENA countries have improved over time and compare favorably with similar measures computed for other countries, notably those in Latin America. Our findings broadly indicate that authoritarian MENA governments that are widely criticized for failing to foster dynamic economies and deliver jobs and high economic growth, have done reasonably well in providing access to basic services and ensuring that they are delivered relatively equitably. We provide decompositions of HOI for individual outcomes over time to account for the contribution of the change in average access vs. its distribution to change in the HOI. We also provide the Shapley decompositions of the Dissimilarity Index of the outcomes to gain insight into the significance of different circumstances to changes in the HOI.

Keywords
human opportunity index, inequality, inequality of opportunity, Shapley, decomposition, education, Middle East