Social justice is an enduring theme in the political discourse of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region. The Arab uprisings of recent years are generally seen as evidence of widely held perceptions of deep inequality in the region. Yet standard measures of economic inequality fail to show that income inequality is particularly high in the Middle East (see Bibi and Nabli 2009 and Belhaj-Hassine 2014). A World Bank (2015) study dubs this "the MENA inequality puzzle."
The papers in this panel address this puzzle. They will present evidence on other, deeper notions of inequality, such as inequality of opportunity in health, education, wages, and consumption, as well as the Human Opportunity Index estimated obtained from income and expenditure surveys from about a dozen MENA countries that have been recently made available to researchers. These papers provide a quantitative assessment of inequality that goes beyond the standard measures of inequality, such as the Gini index, and are closer to the notions of fairness and social justice that animate social protests in the region. The panel also presents evidence obtained from opinion surveys (Gallup and World Values Surveys) to shed light on the type of inequality that people actually care about.
The panel reviews and builds on a growing literature on inequality of opportunity in the region (see for example, Aran and Ersado 2013, Assaad et al 2012, Salehi-Isfahani, et al 2014, and Velez et al. 2012). These studies follow the seminal work of Roemer (1998) who provided the methodology for quantifying the extent of inequality of opportunity by accounting for the contribution of circumstances beyond individual control - such as the characteristics of the family and the community into which a child grows up - to total inequality in income, health or education.
References:
Aran, and Ersado (2013). Inequality of opportunity in access to basic services among Egyptian children. World Bank.
Belhaj-Hassine, (2012). Inequality of opportunity in Egypt. World Bank Economic Review.
Bibi and Nabli (2009). Income inequality in the Arab region: Data and measurement, patterns and trends. Middle East Development Journal
Roemer, J. E. (1998). Equality of Opportunity. Harvard University Press.
Salehi-Isfahani, Belhaj-Hassine, Assaad (2013). Equality of opportunity in educational achievement in the Middle East and North Africa. Journal of Economic Inequality.
Velez, Al-Shawarby, El-Laithy (2012). Equality of opportunity for children in Egypt, 2000-2009. World Bank.
World Bank (2015). Inequality, Uprisings, and Conflict in the Arab World. World Bank
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Dr. Ishac Diwan
This talk will examine changes in public opinion in Egypt in the run-up to the 2011 uprisings, using data from the World Values Survey. Between 2000 and 2008, there was a major increase in popular support for democracy. At the same time, there was also a sizable rise in concerns about inequality, a rise in values associated with modernization, and a fall in support for political Islam. I examine the extent to which these changes were clustered along class, age, and education lines, in order to figure out who were the main champions behind the surge in support for a more democratic order, and what factors were driving them. The main findings are that while in 2000, younger Egyptians were more in favor of democracy than their parents, by 2008, Egyptian opinion became organized around class interests. The new supporters of democracy were concentrated among two groups: one driven by concerns about inequality, especially among those with lower incomes, and one driven by modernization values, especially among the more educated. The middle class, being at the intersection of both groups, emerges as the main champion of democratization. The moderation of political Islam during the period facilitated this shift by reducing the middle class’s fear of change.
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We provide in this paper measures of inequality of opportunity of wages, full income and consumption for Egypt at different points in time from 1988 to 2012. A standard way of measuring the degree of inequality of opportunity in a society is to choose a set of circumstances – characteristics of the individual’s environment that affect his future income and are beyond his control -- and to partition the population into types, where a type is the set of individuals with the same circumstances. Inequality in the outcomes of interest between types is attributable to inequality of opportunity, whereas inequality within types is attributable to effort or luck.
Although measures of inequality of wage income are increasing over time in Egypt starting in 1998, the share attributable to opportunities appears to be declining steadily throughout the whole period. We attribute this decline to the fact that outcomes for the middle class are moving closer to the outcomes of the lower classes. The outcomes for the most privileged groups remain quite different. Another possible explanation is that unobserved circumstances are playing a growing role in inequality of opportunity in Egypt.
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Dr. Caroline Krafft
A perceived lack of social justice played a key role in the recent political events and revolutions in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, referred to as the Arab Spring. Yet relatively little is known about the nature and roots of inequality in the region. The availability of new data in the region allows us, in this research project, to assess inequality of opportunity in higher education—the degree to which the background of young people determines their access to higher education. We focus our investigation on three countries: Egypt, Jordan, and Tunisia. Our work specifically investigates the following question: how does family background affect access to higher education?
There has been very limited analysis of inequality of opportunity in higher education in MENA, primarily because it is difficult to detect the many dimensions of socio-economic status of higher education attendees, who are not living at home in typical surveys. The recently released Egypt, Jordan, and Tunisia Labor Market Panel Surveys of 2012, 2010, and 2014, respectively, provide rich data on educational experiences and outcomes. Additionally, they include information on the family background of thousands of individuals, generating a unique opportunity for analyzing inequality of opportunity in higher education. This data can be used to model the relationship between higher education access and different background characteristics, for instance how much having a mother with higher education increases the probability of a young person entering higher education, all else being equal. Factors we examine include gender, family socio-economic status, region, place of residence (rural/urban), and level of parental education.
Ultimately, we quantify inequality of opportunity using a dissimilarity index, which measures what percentage of the current opportunities to attend higher education would have to be redistributed in order for youth to have equal chances regardless of their background. Further, we use Shapley decompositions to look at the relative role of different factors, such as gender, in this inequality. We link the impact of these factors with the history of the education systems in these countries, for instance whether there is more or less inequality in access to higher education in countries where public spending on education is greater. Based on our research, we identify policy recommendations for education reform in the region.
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Since the Arab uprisings of 2011, there has been much attention on economic inequality in the Arab world as a possible source of popular dissatisfaction with the status quo. Curiously, the standard measures of inequality, such as the Gini index, do not place most Arab countries among the highly unequal developing countries, such as China or Latin American countries (Bibi and Nabli 2009, Belhaj-Hassine 2015). To reconcile the widely held perceptions of profound social and economic injustice in the region (Cammett et al. 2015) with low estimates of income inequality -- the two parts of the MENA inequality puzzle", as labeled by the World Bank (2015) --researchers have looked for evidence of inequality beyond the standard indicators of income and consumption. World Bank (2015) provides evidence of high levels of inequality in financial wealth and Salehi-Isfahani, Belhaj-Hassine, and Assaad (2014) and Assaad, Salehi-Isfahani, and Hendy (2013) find high levels of inequality of opportunity in education in several MENA countries. On the other hand, evidence of economic mobility from wage data in Egypt does not indicate particularly high levels of inequality of opportunity (Belhaj-Hassine 2012).
In this paper we present estimates of the Human Opportunity Index (HOI) for 10 MENA countries using harmonized household expenditure and income surveys. This index measures equality of opportunity in access to basic services (electricity, piped water, sanitation and basic education). We use a uniform set of circumstances to measure access to a service in a given country over time, between MENA countries, and between the MENA region and other developing regions. We find that HOI levels in MENA countries have generally improved over time and compare well with those for Latin America.
Our estimates of inequality of opportunity are lower bounds but provide valuable information on how access to a service in a specific country has changed over time, and how it compares to other countries. We also provide decompositions of the HOI over time (change in average access vs. the distribution of access) and Shapley decompositions of the contribution of different circumstances to progress in human opportunities.
