An ordinal approach to the study of intergenerational opportunities for standard of living: The case of Latin America

This paper looks at the intergenerational transmission of opportunities for standard of living in Latin America. It proposes to study this question on the basis of an ordinal approach. This ordinal approach borrows recent ideas on the way to compare opportunity sets, that is, to rank matrices giving, for example, the distribution of individuals by level of education of their parents and the standard of living (income) of the group to which they belong. Such comparisons are based on the use of the concepts of rank and Generalized Lorenz Dominance. The empirical illustration is based on the data of the 2006 Latinobarómetro survey which covered 18 Latin American countries and the standard of living of individuals (children) was derived from an algorithm allowing one to compute the order of acquisition of durable goods and access to services.