Assessing Inequality of Human Opportunities: A New Approach for Public Policy in Tunisia

The universally used socioeconomic indices like education and housing indicators (access to water, sanitation and electricity) appraise solely the coverage level of basic opportunities in a society without capturing the differential intensity across various subgroups. This paper provides a new application of the known Human Opportunity Index (HOI) in order to assess the inequality in distribution of basic services at regional scale in one of the MENA's most unequal countries. Based on the differentiation between circumstance and effort variables in John Roemer's theory, we correlate inequality of opportunities with seven observed circumstances which are not controllable by individuals. Logistic regressions required to calculate various HOI indexes are used to estimate the contribution of main socioeconomic and demographic circumstances. Large and significant disparities particularly in access to safe water and sanitation have been detected between the eastern (littoral) and western (inland) areas. The residence area, the education level of household head and the per capita household expenditure were the most important circumstances causing such regional disparities. The paper affords also some potential policy implications through the HOI estimation results.