Browsing by Autor "Jaya Krishnakumar"

Now showing 1 - 3 of 3

Education, skills and a good job: A multidimensional econometric analysis
(Elsevier BV, 2019) Jaya Krishnakumar; Ricardo Nogales
Public Policies and Equality of Opportunity for Wellbeing in Multiple Dimensions: A Theoretical Discussion and Evidence from Bolivia
(Springer Science+Business Media, 2019) Jaya Krishnakumar; Ricardo Nogales
Abstract Roemer’s equality of opportunity (EOp) theory is increasingly used as the framework for assessing the link between public policies and social justice. Most studies focus on a single (monetary) wellbeing indicator and take individual efforts as being randomly distributed. However, recent development theories have uniformly advocated the use of a multidimensional wellbeing measure and the importance of individual responsibility. We propose a theoretical framework and a modelling tool to include these aspects in an assessment of the connection between public policies and inequality of opportunity for wellbeing within a Romerian setting. Using Bolivian data, we demonstrate the empirical usefulness of our framework and find that Bolivian social programmes are strongly associated with the reduction of unfair inequalities arising from ethnicity and family background, although their levels are far away from being optimal. We highlight the role of effort in this connection and show that it is a fundamental mediating factor.
Public policies for wellbeing with justice: A theoretical discussion based on capabilities and opportunities
(International Journal of Wellbeing, 2015) Jaya Krishnakumar; Ricardo Nogales
This article presents a theoretical framework that combines virtues and strengths of the Capability Approach (CA) and Equality of Opportunity (EOp) approach for analyzing public policies that aim to improve individual wellbeing and social justice. We show that neither approach is sufficient on its own for this goal. It is particularly useful to combine the two approaches because the CA offers a positive way of thinking about what wellbeing is, while the EOp Approach provides more formal insights on how to configure public policies to achieve social justice and increase individual wellbeing from a normative perspective. We make the case that EOp in its original (ex-post) conception is too heavily centered on lifestyle outcomes and oblivious to individual heterogeneity. However, we argue that it contains elements that are compatible with the CA rationale from an ex-ante point of view. Individual efforts play a crucial conceptual role in our proposed combination because they influence and are influenced by individual capabilities. Our optimal policy for improving wellbeing with EOp is one that aims to equalize expected capabilities across different groups, characterized by circumstances, through a maximin algorithm. We provide a technical analysis of our optimal policy taking into account the influence of circumstances and policies on efforts and capabilities.