An evaluation of the human opportunities in El Salvador

Abstract

Inequality in El Salvador has become an inherent component to society, a structural ailment that is accepted and which conditions opportunities for children. Who are strongly influenced by the place they live in.

 Two estimates on the Human Opportunities Index (IOH, given its Spanish acronym) were conducted during this research. The first one was designated to evidence the unequal opportunity distribution in territories, to strip those regions which urgently need to be intervened and thus foster their reorientation. The second one unveiled the explanatory factors of the IOH discrepancies in said place by using Shorrocks-Shapley inequality decomposition by factor components (1999), hence evaluating its evolution in time.

In spite of the territorial advances that were observed in terms of the IOH, some significant regional patterns persist. The central fringes of El Salvador, identified by the main corridors of the principal cities, Santa Ana, San Salvador, the northern part of San Miguel and La Libertad, prove to have better opportunities for development than the rest of the country. The northern and southern fringes include territories that are lagged behind, with the IOH in the lower limit of distribution. In comparing the north and south areas of El Salvador, the opportunities are higher in the south (coastal area) than in the north (the mountains). In like manner, it is evident that the municipalities that are more interlinked, are less multidimensionality poor, which have less rurality and, in some cases, show a lower socioeconomic vulnerability in the face of climate change, are those which have either improved or maintained their opportunity status.

Entorno, octubre 2016, número 62: 63-104