IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/wbk/wbrwps/8512.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Jati inequality in rural Bihar

Author

Listed:
  • Joshi,Shareen
  • Kochhar,Nishtha
  • Rao,Vijayendra

Abstract

Caste is a persistent driver of inequality in India, and it is generally analyzed with government-defined broad categories, such as Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe. In everyday life, however, caste is lived and experienced as jati, which is a local system of stratification. Little is known about economic inequality at the jati level. This paper uses data from poor rural districts in Bihar to explore expenditure inequality at the jati level. Inequality decompositions show much more variation between jatis than between broad caste categories. The analysis finds that even within generally disadvantaged Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes, some jatis are significantly worse off than others. Consistent with previous work, the paper also finds that inequality is largely driven by inequality within jatis. This finding has implications for the implementation of large-scale poverty alleviation programs: the benefits of programs intended for disadvantaged castes are concentrated among specific jatis.

Suggested Citation

  • Joshi,Shareen & Kochhar,Nishtha & Rao,Vijayendra, 2018. "Jati inequality in rural Bihar," Policy Research Working Paper Series 8512, The World Bank.
    • Handle: RePEc:wbk:wbrwps:8512
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/216201531237182176/pdf/WPS8512.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Bhupatiraju,Sandeep & Chen,Daniel Li & Joshi,Shareen & Neis,Peter Konstantin, 2021. "Who Is in Justice? Caste, Religion and Gender in the Courts of Bihar over a Decade," Policy Research Working Paper Series 9555, The World Bank.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:wbk:wbrwps:8512. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Roula I. Yazigi (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/dvewbus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.