Invariant features of spatial inequality in consumption: The case of India

Arnab Chatterjee, Anindya S. Chakrabarti, Asim Ghosh, Anirban Chakraborti and Tushar Nandi ()

Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, 2016, vol. 442, issue C, 169-181

Abstract: We study the distributional features and inequality of consumption expenditure across India, for different states, castes, religion and urban–rural divide. We find that even though the aggregate measures of inequality are fairly diversified across states, the consumption distributions show near identical statistics, once properly normalized. This feature is seen to be robust with respect to variations in sociological and economic factors. We also show that state-wise inequality seems to be positively correlated with growth which is in accord with the traditional idea of Kuznets’ curve. We present a brief model to account for the invariance found empirically and show that better but riskier technology draws can create a positive correlation between inequality and growth.

Keywords: Spatial inequality; Consumption expenditure (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

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Working Paper: Invariant features of spatial inequality in consumption: the case of India (2015)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:phsmap:v:442:y:2016:i:c:p:169-181

DOI: 10.1016/j.physa.2015.09.019

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