Territorial and individual educational inequality: A Capability Approach analysis for Italy.

Abstract

This paper aims to investigate territorial and individual inequality in education according to Sen's Capability Approach that focuses on how public and private resources may be “converted” into educational attainments. We analysed the Italian case by constructing a new longitudinal dataset from 1993 to 2012 using repeated cross-sections of the main social survey by the Italian Statistical Institute. We examined the educational divide between the Centre-North and the South using the Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition and we estimated the Educational Kuznets Curve through a dynamic panel model. According to the results, the Southern educational gap is mainly influenced by the relative ineffectiveness of public expenditure in Southern Italy, where private economic wealth has a stronger educational impact. We verified Kuznets's hypothesis concerning the inverted U-shaped relationship between educational inequality and attainments. Moreover, individual educational inequality appears to be path dependent, positively linked to economic inequality and negatively influenced by educational public expenditure.