 Are Urban-Rural Welfare Differences Growing in India?No 11174, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) Abstract: Using data from the large scale consumption expenditure surveys collected by Indian National Sample Survey Organization, we examine the urban-rural welfare gap in India in 1983, 1993-94, 2004-05, and 2011-12 across the entire distribution. Our main measure of welfare is spatially adjusted per capita consumption expenditure. We find that the urban-rural gap increased considerably between 1993-94 and 2004-05, and increase is larger at the higher quantiles. Using the unconditional quantile regression decomposition, we find that majority of the gap is explained by the urban advantage in endowments in all four years. The contribution of the unexplained effect (differences in rewards) in urban advantage was negative in 1983 and 1993-94 across the entire distribution. We find that difference in educational distribution across urban and rural areas is the most important driver of the observed gap. We find similar patterns using income data for 2004-05 and 2011-12 from India Human Development Surveys. Keywords: urban-rural welfare gap; unconditional quantile regression; India (search for similar items in EconPapers) Published - substantially revised version published as 'Accounting for growing urban-rural welfare gaps in India' in: World Development, 2019, 122, 410-432 Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:iza:izadps:dp11174 Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from Access Statistics for this paper More papers in IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) IZA, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC. |
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