Measuring Human Opportunity Index in Education for I.R. Iran

Equality of opportunity ensures fair distribution of goods and main services among children irrespective of circumstances like gender, family background, and place of residence. In addition, the Human Opportunity Index (HOI) is one way of accounting for differences in access to a particular opportunity over a particular period of time across and within countries. This index shows how equitable the distribution of opportunities is. In the present article, the concepts of inequality of opportunity and HOI have been elaborated on. Afterwards, inequality of access to education as well as fairness of the distribution of children’s access to education was measured using statistical data provided by Iran Statistics Center. To this end, separable logistic model and the method proposed by De Barros et al. were utilized. Results showed that the likelihood of having access to primary education has increased from 2004 to 2013 and HOI has improved. This improvement can be attributed to two factors: First, improvement in educational coverage rate in the society and second, decline in inequality of access to education among diverse population groups. According to the findings, scale effect is the main source of increase in HOI. In spite of the fact that distribution effect has also increased, its share compared to scale effect is negligible. This in turn is indicative of the fact that inequality of access to education among individuals based on circumstances still prevails.