Abstract
Building on the current literature that increasingly recognizes inequality of opportunity among children, this paper analyzes to what extent access to basic education and core services is influenced by family and individual background factors in Tunisia. The analysis uses the Human Opportunity Index (HOI) methodology developed recently at the World Bank, and micro data from the National Survey on Households’ Budget, Consumption and Standard of Living (HBCLS) for 2010. The main contribution of the study is its in-depth investigation of the key factors affecting child development in Tunisia. The results reveal large and persistent interregional and intra-regional disparities among children, mainly in pre-secondary school enrollment and access to safe water and sanitation services. Such inequalities of opportunity, obviously shown between inland and littoral regions, are found to be driven mainly by geographic factors and parents” education and wealth. These findings may have important policy implications in term of developing better-targeted interventions aiming to reduce inequality in accessing basic services.
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Notes
The 2010 National Survey on Households’ Budget, Consumption and Standard of Living can be downloaded from the official website of the Tunisian National Institute of Statistics (www.ins.nat.tn).
The present section merely gives the basic conceptual method for calculating the Human Opportunities Index. For further details and discussion, refer de Barros et al. (2009) which has a more exhaustive explanation of the procedure for computing the second component of the HOI, the Dissimilarity index (D-index), for estimating inequality of opportunity in access to given services. The methodology used in this section hence follows analogous notations as far as possible in order to retain coherence and comparison.
In this study we focus particularly on children as we assume that many of the differences in opportunities are generated during childhood and carried out the whole life. In fact children’s access to basic services or lack thereof will surely determine, in the future, their education, health and labor market outcomes, and hence their income-earning potential as adults. Several longitudinal studies have argues that investments in children from poor and vulnerable families can translate into higher earnings in adulthood, later in life, then helping break the cycle of poverty.
The D-index, as noted in de Barros et al. (2009), is a version of the dissimilarity index (D) broadly used in sociology and applied to dichotomous outcomes.
Because of these difficulties and social exclusion, Sidi Bouzid and Gafsa (located both in the Middle Western region) were the bed of the recent Tunisian revolution.
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Jemmali, H., Amara, M. On Measuring and Decomposing Inequality of Opportunity among Children: Evidence from Tunisia. Applied Research Quality Life 13, 137–155 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11482-017-9511-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11482-017-9511-1