DECENTRALIZING EQUALITY OF OPPORTUNITY* |
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| Authors: | Caterina Calsamiglia |
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| Affiliation: | 1. Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Spain;2. I thank Stephen Morris, John E. Roemer, Hanming Fang, and Donald J. Brown for valuable advice, and very specially Antoni Calvó‐Armengol, who has influenced me deeply and whom I will sorely miss. I am also grateful to two referees and the editor for very useful comments that have helped improve the article substantially. I also thank Xavier Calsamiglia, Ariel Rubinstein, and seminar participants for helpful comments and encouragement. The work is partially supported by the Generalitat de Catalunya through grant 2005SGR00454 and by the Spanish Ministry of Education and Science through grant SEJ2005‐01481/ECON and FEDER, the Barcelona Economics Program (XREA), and the CONSOLIDER‐INGENIO 2010 (CSD2006‐00016) grant. Please address correspondence to: Caterina Calsamiglia, Departament d'Economia i Història Econòmica, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Edifici B‐ Campus de Bellaterra, 08193 Barcelona, Spain. E‐mail: . |
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| Abstract: | In a global justice problem, equality of opportunity is satisfied if individual well‐being is independent of exogenous irrelevant characteristics. Policymakers, however, address questions involving local justice problems. We interpret a collection of local justice problems as the decentralized global justice problem. We show that controlling for effort locally, which is not required by the global justice objective, is sufficient for decentralizing equality of opportunity. Moreover, under some conditions, equalizing rewards to effort is not only sufficient but necessary. This implies in particular that most affirmative action policies may not contribute to providing equality of opportunity. |
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