ABSTRACT
Current proposals to assess the progressive reduction and elimination of inequalities and the achievement of universal access focus on whether a country has reached its target, without consideration of the different initial inequality gaps that countries have. The risk associated with this approach is that for countries with a large inequality gap, significant progress towards inequality reduction is not rewarded if inequalities are not eliminated. This chapter describes the use of frontier analysis as a method to benchmark rates of change and compare country performance against the historically best-performing countries with similar initial inequality gaps. The first section describes the current approaches of measuring reductions in inequalities, with frontier analysis introduced in the next section as an alternative approach that identifies benchmark values of progress. The next two sections apply this method to assess the progress towards the reduction of rural–urban inequalities and the relative progress between the higher-served and lesser-served populations, respectively, for countries with available data. The penultimate section describes how this indicator of progress towards reducing inequality can be interpreted and used. Finally, the Conclusion discusses the limitations and future direction of the frontier analysis and benchmarking approach for inequalities.
