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DECENTRALIZING EQUALITY OF OPPORTUNITY *
Author(s) -
Calsamiglia Caterina
Publication year - 2009
Publication title -
international economic review
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 2.658
H-Index - 86
eISSN - 1468-2354
pISSN - 0020-6598
DOI - 10.1111/j.1468-2354.2008.00530.x
Subject(s) - economic justice , global justice , action (physics) , equal opportunity , affirmative action , law and economics , economics , public economics , political science , microeconomics , law , physics , quantum mechanics
In a global justice problem, equality of opportunity is satisfied if individual well‐being is independent of exogenous irrelevant characteristics. Policymakers, however, address questions involving local justice problems. We interpret a collection of local justice problems as the decentralized global justice problem. We show that controlling for effort locally, which is not required by the global justice objective, is sufficient for decentralizing equality of opportunity. Moreover, under some conditions, equalizing rewards to effort is not only sufficient but necessary. This implies in particular that most affirmative action policies may not contribute to providing equality of opportunity.