Inequality of opportunity, poverty, and economic development

Traditionally, countries’ level of development has been measured by the Gross Domestic Product. However, in the last decades, the use of this common statistic has been questioned both in the academic and policy arena. The main reason is that such monetary aggregate would fail to capture distributive, non-monetary, and processual aspects in the generation of a society’s achievement, thereby leading only to a partial evaluation of its degree of development. The perspective of equality of opportunity, rooted in an appealing conception of social justice which is particularly salient in modern societies, could be the way to follow for a more comprehensive assessment of economic development. This paper explores the consequences of adopting the equality of opportunity perspective for the definition and the measurement of important social objectives such as the economic development and the eradication of poverty.