Contributions of education to inequality of opportunity in income: A counterfactual estimation with data from China

Distinguishing the sources of inequality from an ethical perspective is a significant contribution of luck egalitarian to study inequality since the second half of the century, which has laid the foundation of the concept equality of opportunity. This article aims to construct a model to quantify how education affects the inequality of income opportunities, and decomposes education into factors of circumstances and efforts as the source contributing to inequality of income. The effect of the former is deemed unjust while that of the latter just. In this study, with the data collected from 1993 to 2011 China Health and Nutrition Survey, and the adoption of counterfactual simulation approach, we find that during China's transformation, circumstance factors and educational factors all demonstrated an inverse U-shaped trend in their contribution to inequality of income opportunity in China. In recent years, however, educational contributions as circumstances have started to outpace those as efforts, which indicated that education has increasingly played a more unjust role rather than justice to the inequality of income. In addition, young people in recent years have fewer opportunities in income through their educational efforts, which shows the tendency of solidification and sedimentation in Chinese society.