This paper uses the Human Opportunity Index (HOI) developed by the World Bank to assess the coverage and distributional equity of basic services and nutritional outcomes for children in Türkiye for the period 1993-2018. Using micro-level data from the Türkiye Demographic and Health Surveys (TDHS), we calculated the HOI and the Multidimensional HOI (MHOI) to quantitatively capture the structural inequalities that determine children’s life chances and employed Shapley decomposition to identify how circumstances contribute to these inequalities. The analysis focuses on opportunities based on both basic infrastructure services (source of drinking water, type of toilet facility, PD, and antenatal care) and nutritional outcomes (stunting, underweight, and wasting). The findings reveal that although coverage has expanded in Türkiye, the principle of equity has not been sufficiently upheld. Socio-spatial circumstances, such as wealth, urban-rural disparities, and parental education, are the most important determinants of unequal access to opportunities. Decomposition analyses show that the increase in coverage rates has not directly led to equality of opportunity and that, in particular, simultaneous access to multiple opportunities remains a serious obstacle. As one of the first long-term applications of the HOI and MHOI in the Turkish context, this study contributes to the normative discussion of the intergenerational transmission of inequality and proposes a concrete analytical framework for monitoring and evaluating child-centred social policies.
LİMANLI et al. (Thu,) studied this question.