Inequality of Opportunity in Indian Society

Tista Kundu and Arnaud Lefranc

No 14, CSH-IFP Working Papers from Centre de Sciences Humaines, New Delhi

Abstract: Recent debates on distributive justice have started to prioritize inequality of opportunities, thatis exclusively generated from circumstance factors beyond individual control. Using data from theNational Sample Survey we estimate inequality of opportunity for India in consumption expenditureand wage earning, on the basis of caste, sex, region and parental backgrounds as our circumstances.Adopting the widely used methods of non-parametric and parametric analysis, we find that even in2011-12, more than one-third of the total wage inequality can be attributed to the differences in theascribed social positions of an individual. Inequality of opportunity in consumption on the otherhand is relatively low. Furthermore, we used the regression tree algorithm to find the hierarchicalorder among the circumstances and construct the opportunity tree for India, that the previousmethods are unable to provide. In the fashion of machine learning, the opportunity tree identifiesparental background as one of the most important circumstance factor behind the underlying unequalopportunity in the country, for either outcomes. But the effect of casteism is prominent as well, thatin interaction with region, affirms a forward caste premium for most part of the country, particularlyfor the regular salaried wage earners.

Keywords: Caste; Inequality of opportunity; Mean Log Deviation; Multiple imputation; Parental background; Regression tree (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D31 J71 O12 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 37 pages
Date: 2020-05, Revised 2020-05
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Published in the CSH-IFP Working Papers series

Downloads: (external link)
https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-02539364/document (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Inequality of Opportunity in Indian Society (2020)
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:aed:wpaper:0014

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CSH-IFP Working Papers from Centre de Sciences Humaines, New Delhi Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by CSH ().