A Note on Ex-ante Inequality of Opportunity across Mexican Regions

In this paper, Monroy-Gómez-Franco provide the first set of estimates of ex-ante inequality of opportunity in access to economic resources at the regional level for the Mexican case. By employing a novel dataset and an extensive set of circumstances, the author show that at the national level, inequality of opportunity represents at least 48% of the total inequality in the distribution of economic resources observed in Mexico. The region with the highest lower bound is the Centre and Mexico City (43% and 45% of total inequality), while the North of the country is the region with the smallest one (33% of total inequality). This ordering is preserved through all cohorts under analysis. In all cases, the main factor in producing inequality of opportunity is the economic resources of the household of origin. Across all regions, ethnicity and skin color play a statistically significant role.