Decomposition of inter-regional poverty gap in India: a spatial approach

Somnath Chattopadhyay, Amita Majumder and Hasanur Jaman

Empirical Economics, 2014, vol. 46, issue 1, 65-99

Abstract: This paper examines the impact of various socio-economic factors on consumption in rural West Bengal, an eastern state of India, using a regression-based technique reformulated in a spatial framework. The difference of incidences of poverty (head count ratios) in two parts (North and South) of rural West Bengal is then decomposed using the familiar Oaxaca decomposition methodology into an aggregate characteristics effect, which is interpreted as a resource effect and an aggregate coefficients effect, which is interpreted as an efficiency effect. An important observation from the present analysis is that the poorer North Bengal has a scarcity in terms of availability of characteristics (resources) compared to that in South Bengal and the resource scarcity in North Bengal is the dominant factor causing the poverty gap between the two parts of West Bengal. Thus, attention needs to be paid to North Bengal with respect to enhancement of important policy variables like education level, Government aid, and employment opportunities. Copyright Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2014

Keywords: Poverty; Oaxaca decomposition; Spatial regression; C21; I32 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1007/s00181-013-0683-8 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:empeco:v:46:y:2014:i:1:p:65-99

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... rics/journal/181/PS2

DOI: 10.1007/s00181-013-0683-8

Access Statistics for this article

Empirical Economics is currently edited by Robert M. Kunst, Arthur H.O. van Soest, Bertrand Candelon, Subal C. Kumbhakar and Joakim Westerlund

More articles in Empirical Economics from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().