 The Indian Household Finance LandscapeCristian Badarinza, Vimal Balasubramaniam () and Tarun Ramadorai India Policy Forum, 2017, vol. 13, issue 1, 1-71 Abstract: Using the most recent wave of the All India Debt and Investment Survey data, we describe and attempt to explain several important features of Indian household balance sheets. When compared with data on households in a range of developed and emerging economies, Indian households, on average, tend to hold a high fraction of non-financial assets with particularly high relative weights in real estate and gold, hold negligible retirement assets, and rely on non-institutional debt as their primary source of debt. These propensities are also evident along the life cycle, as well as at almost all points in the wealth distribution, and correlated with location (rural versus urban), education, and family composition. Controlling for demographics, substantial state-level variation remains in asset and debt holdings which is related to state-level factors including historical inflation volatility, the share of the population in public sector employment, and the density of bank branch networks. We discuss the potential implications of these results for policy. Keywords: Household Finance; Household Balance Sheet; International Comparisons; India; Gold; Indebtedness (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nca:ncaerj:v:13:y:2017:i:2017-1:p:1-71 Access Statistics for this article India Policy Forum is currently edited by B Ramesh More articles in India Policy Forum from National Council of Applied Economic Research Contact information at EDIRC. |
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