In particular, this analysis adds to the existing work on equality of opportunities and fiscal policies, linking the recently developed HOI to fiscal issues. It does so by including the equality of opportunity angle to traditional BIA and illustrating the potential of this analysis to effectively guide public policy decisions. The empirical analysis was conducted for a few piloting countries and compared the distributive incidence analysis of public spending on education for each country. The OIA was also conducted for a health care opportunity in the case of Paraguay, with an example of how it can be used for guiding policy in the areas of improving targeting decisions and prioritizing fiscal interventions based on a cost benefit of their redistributive impact.

This paper first compared side-by-side BIA and OIA, the latter replicating the mechanics of BIA along a distribution of opportunities, proxied by the estimated probability of accessing/using a basic service. This exercise confirms that BIA and OIA provide similar results in terms of diagnosis. In other words, the OIA does not deviate substantially from the BIA in terms of the conventional wisdom but their messages do not always coincide. Interestingly, both approaches confirm the influential role of households’ private contributions toward education. Depending on the extent to which household contributions increase along the set of most favorable circumstances, the final distributive outcome can turn progressive, neutral, or regressive. More complex is the distribution of access to health care services analyzed in Paraguay—for which information was available to distinguish attention types and regional spending—in part reflecting the fact that different medical conditions may not follow clear socioeconomic lines.

This evidence should hopefully be useful in complementing policy debates in several directions. Equality of opportunities clearly underscores the need to think carefully on _how_ to spend current resources more effectively with a longer-run perspective. How can we be effective in improving access to opportunities that, in some cases, are very far from universal provision, while in others, there are very unequally distributed across population groups? While not exclusive in theory, budgetary constraints in practice may call for a policy decision regarding which side to prioritize (universal access or equality across groups), that is, interventions that either expand coverage or reduce access inequalities. OIA can be a tool to provide relevant empirical evidence on the consequences of using each type of intervention. Also, it identifies which groups are lagging behind in terms of opportunities and, therefore, which objectives need be targeted more urgently, regardless of the instrument, whether conditional cash transfers, school programs, or any other interventions conceived.

This particular application of the OIA framework provides a simple mechanism to channel public resources more equitably. Additional public spending may be better targeted to those population groups that (i) average large gaps between their share of total population and their share of public benefits associated with that opportunity _and_ (ii) experience a large degree of vulnerability in their access to a 32