Inequality of opportunity in Egypt

Latest From Brookings

It is rare to read an account of the Arab Spring uprisings without a reference to economic injustice. Indeed, it is natural to believe that economic and social injustice fuel, if not cause, all revolutions. For this plausible generalization, the Egyptian revolt of January 2011 is a puzzle. Research shows that, compared to most poor countries, Egypt’s income inequality was low at this time, was not worsening, and its poverty rate was actually falling. Egypt is a prime case of what the World Bank calls  “the [Middle East and North Africa (MENA)] inequality puzzle.” 

There have been various attempts to solving the puzzle. Extending the conventional household expenditure and income surveys to capture top incomes has raised the Gini index of inequality up by as much as 15 points, but this does not challenge Egypt’s relative position based on standard surveys.
We know that income inequality is one way to measure the deeper meanings of economic injustice, but perhaps not the most relevant one. The capitalist refrain is that unequal incomes are necessary to give individuals the incentive to strive, and, as long as the opportunities for advancement are equal, participants in the competitive economic game are willing to tolerate it. According to this optimistic take on human nature, perception of injustice is less about keeping up with the Jones’s and more about if your children can keep up with theirs.
Thanks to pioneering work by John Roemer, we can actually measure this type of inequality, known as inequality of opportunity, as the share of inequality in a specific outcome—education or income—explained by circumstances beyond a person’s control, such as gender, ethnicity, and family background, to total inequality.
Applying this concept to test scores obtained from Trends in Mathematics and Science Study, Ragui Assaad of the University of Minnesota, Nadia Belhaj-Hassine of the World Bank, and ...

Read More