Growth, Openness and the Socially Disadvantaged

Megha Mukim and Arvind Panagariya

No 1113, Working Papers from School of International and Public Affairs, Columbia University

Abstract: We offer a comprehensive analysis of the evolution of poverty by social groups in India since 1983 and study the impact of growth and openness on the headcount ratio. We show that at the national level poverty has declined with every successive quinquennial survey in both rural and urban areas for the Scheduled Castes (SC), Scheduled Tribes (ST) and the non-Scheduled (NS) population. We conclude that there is no statistically significant evidence whatsoever that rising per-capita incomes and increased openness have hurt any of the three broad social groups. Beyond this bottom line, we find that per-capita income has a negative and statistically significant effect on poverty levels for the SC, non-Scheduled groups and all groups taken together. The effect on poverty levels for the SC is negative but statistically insignificant. We also find the effect of one or more measures of openness on poverty reduction to be positive and statistically significant in rural and urban areas and in both regions taken together for the SC and non-Scheduled groups, although for the ST the effect is statistically significant in urban areas only.

Keywords: India; growth; socially disadvantaged; poverty; openness (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 41 pages
Date: 2011-06, Revised 2011-06
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Downloads: (external link)
http://indianeconomy.columbia.edu/sites/default/fi ... rs/paper_1-mukim.pdf First version, 2011 (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 404 Not Found (http://indianeconomy.columbia.edu/sites/default/files/working_papers/paper_1-mukim.pdf [301 Moved Permanently]--> https://indianeconomy.columbia.edu/sites/default/files/working_papers/paper_1-mukim.pdf)

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:ecq:wpaper:1113

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from School of International and Public Affairs, Columbia University Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Ursula Schwarzhaupt ().