Publication details

• Wednesday | 01 Jul, 1998
• Mozaffar Qizilbash
• Research Reports,Project Publications
• 26

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Mozaffar Qizilbash, SDPI 1998 Abstract This paper argues that opportunity for well-being rather than income or capability should be the focus of egalitarian concern. Rankings of alternatives in terms of equality of opportunity are typically incomplete. It is argued that measures such as those involving the proportion of people who achieve some level of a component of well-being can proxy opportunity and that ordinal information alone should be used to arrive at the ranking of overall inequality. These arguments are brought to bear on the problem of making international comparisons of gender inequality. Judgements based on dominance, Borda and intersection Borda rankings are compared. The Borda ranking differs considerably from the UNDP's GEM ranking. However, intersection Borda ranking comes closest to matching our shared judgements of inequality. Paper prepared for the Annual Conference of the Development Studies Association, University of East Anglia, Norwich, 11-13 September 1997.