EQUALITY OF OPPORTUNITY: POLICY AND MEASUREMENT PARADIGMS

Abstract Equality of opportunity is a widely accepted principle of distributive justice and it is the leading idea of most political platforms in several countries. According to this principle, a society might institute policies that secure an equal distribution of the means to reach a valuable outcome among its members. Once the set of opportunities have been equalized, which particular opportunity, the individual chooses from those open to her, is outside the scope of justice. Ex ante inequalities, and only those inequalities, should be eliminated or compensated for by public intervention. The recent literature on the opportunity egalitarianism often merges these questions introducing two different economic issues. On one side the design of a public policy intended to implement the equality of opportunity view and on the other side the problem of measuring the degree of opportunity inequality in a society. We describe the basic setting and assumptions of some different approaches derived by Roemer’s algorithm for public policy and then we discuss some theoretical and empirical studies to separate and test alternative paradigms on the measurement of inequality of opportunity. Accordingly, an extended critique on the causality issue on policies and measurements is taken into account.     

Currency substitution and the stability of the Italian demand for money before the entry into the monetary union, 1972–1998

A money demand function for M2 is estimated for Italy for the period 1972–1998 within an error correction framework. This period has been characterized by major structural changes in the Italian financial system and by major changes in monetary policy. This study takes these changes into account. Moreover, currency substitution, especially between Italy and Germany is incorporated into the model. By accounting for structural breaks and currency substitution a stable money demand function can be found.Financial support from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, SFB 373, is gratefully acknowledged. We thank Uwe Hassler, Goethe Universität, Frankfurt, and Carsten Trenkler, SFB 373, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, for helpful comments. An earlier version has been presented at the ESEM 2001, Lausanne.     

Reforming the reform: changing roles for accounting and management in the Italian health care sector

This paper examines the ways in which accounting has intervened in the process of reforming the original ‘reform’ of the Italian health care system. By stepping into an ongoing process accounting has been asked not only to foster efficiency, effectiveness and value for money, but to correct as well the ‘degeneration’ of the original reform, which subjected health care delivery to ‘democratic’ scrutiny and political control. The call for a greater accountability in the use of public resources has been thus interpreted as both a mechanism of surveillance and control and a way to resist the ‘over-politicization’ of health sector management together with the abuses, scandals and fraudulent behaviour it induced. In seeking to interpret the specificity of the Italian experience, the paper suggests that the range of ‘the contexts in which accounting operates’ should be broadened in order to gain a deeper understanding of its roles in those institutions, such as health care systems, which play a crucial role in modern societies. In order to move in this direction systematic and empirically grounded cross-national comparisons are called for, since, although accounting and management are involved in virtually all attempts to redesign health care services, consequences are likely to be different when conditions of possibility differ at the outset.