Promoting social mobility and equality of opportunity remains an important challenge for OECD countries. It is therefore critical to understand citizens’ perceptions on social risks and on the role of institutions and market players in providing everyone with equal chances to succeed in life.
To explore people’s perceptions of equal opportunity, the OECD, with the support of Amundi, included a module on “opportunities” in the 2022 wave of the OECD Risks that Matter survey. This module targeted the general population across 27 OECD countries with a sample of approximately 1,000 respondents per country, stratified by sex, age group, education level, income level, and employment status.
In particular, the Opportunities module collected evidence on the following thematic areas identified as lacking comparable information:
- the relative importance of different aspects of inequality;
- people’s views on the role of effort and factors beyond people’s control in shaping inequality of opportunity; and
- people’s views of the role different actors play in reducing inequality and of the type of policies and actions to prioritise.
Data collection on these topics greatly contributes to fill existing evidence gaps on issues that are at the core of the public debate in many OECD countries.
