opportunities during childhood cannot always be compensated for. Child malnutrition, for example, can generate life-long learning difficulties, poor health and lower productivity and earnings over a lifetime (Alderman and others, 2006 and Hoddinott and others, 2008).

James Heckman (2012) makes a compelling case that public policy interventions early in life can produce “positive and lasting effects on children in disadvantaged families.”<sup>29</sup> He stresses that both cognitive abilities and non-cognitive characteristics – such as perseverance, attentiveness, motivation, selfconfidence, and other socio-emotional qualities that are highly important for social success – develop in early childhood. Early interventions can improve cognitive as well as socio-emotional skills, which in fact enhance the benefits of later interventions. To foster greater equality of opportunity and a more dynamic economy, he calls for a shift in social policy toward early intervention, with later interventions designed to reinforce those early efforts.

Therefore, improving opportunities for children – by improving coverage and reducing inequality of opportunity – is not just about building a “just society”, important as that is, but also about realizing a society’s aspirations of economic prosperity. Notably, the dividends of investing in opportunities among children are likely to accumulate over time and across generations. Heckman calls improving the early lives of disadvantaged children as “pre-distribution”, and argues that such pre-distribution “is far more effective than simple redistribution in promoting social inclusion and, at the same time, at promoting economic efficiency and workforce productivity”.

A focus on equality of opportunity in the social contract is thus necessary to promote shared prosperity from the point of view of equity and growth alike, as well as to sustain increases of the less well-off in the medium term. When the distribution of opportunities is linked to circumstances like gender, region, ethnicity, or parental background, the upward mobility of an entire group of people is impeded. Closing the opportunity gaps in society, and particularly so among children, is therefore necessary for promoting and sustaining income growth of the less well off in the medium term.

Addressing inequality of opportunity can also be optimal from a social and political economy perspective. Recent research for countries in the Europe & Central Asia region suggests that citizens of countries with higher inequality of opportunity are more likely to perceive their society as unfair and report lower life satisfaction. Moreover, perceptions of fairness seem to have a stronger correlation with inequality of opportunity than overall (or interpersonal) income inequality (Abras and others, 2013).<sup>30</sup> Thus, when inequality of opportunity is high, building social stability and achieving consensus on a social contract can become more difficult. Breaking such a cycle would require a focus on reducing such inequities, in a visible way that mends perceptions, repairs trust and builds policy consensus among citizens. Just focusing on reducing opportunity gaps, however, would not be enough, since the _process_ through which opportunities are equalized matters as well. This requires promoting the notion of “process freedom” or agency, which is based on the idea that individuals are also the agents of development, and the path of development needs to be one that enables them to have voice and to participate in the processes that affect their lives.

# _Opportunities for all is a distant goal in most developing countries_

Inequality of opportunity is not a challenge for developing countries alone. Heckman calls “the accident of birth” to be a principal source of inequality in the United States, for example. The problem, however, is even more acute in developing countries. In many low-income developing countries, the goal of universal and equal opportunities, even in terms of access to the most basic goods and services, remains distant. For example, a study of 20 countries in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) shows access to basic goods and services among children to be highly inadequate in almost all the countries and unequally distributed among children of different circumstances (Figure 8).<sup>31</sup> 16