Information support for research on opportunity inequality: critical review and theoretical foundation

The paper deals with information base of empirical research on inequality of opportunity. Most of the works are devoted to assessing the contribution of inequality of opportunities to individual economic achievements; there are also works on inequality of opportunity in education and health. Gender, age, place of birth, parents’ education and their professional status are usually used as factors-circumstances, education and migration are used as efforts. All researches are based on data from ready-made surveys, so the choice of individual achievements, circumstances, efforts is due to the availability of data. As a result, many aspects remain unaccounted for, which is likely to underestimate the inequality of opportunity. The theoretical models of individual achievements, circumstances, and efforts proposed in the paper made it possible to describe in detail the content of these concepts and determine which particular aspects are ignored. The authors propose a prospective approach to the formation of the information base, which involves the preliminary comprehensive analysis of individual achievements, factors-circumstances and factors-efforts, followed by the sociological survey that covers all aspects of these categories. Such an approach leads to more accurately estimation of inequality of opportunity.