An Illustration: Multidimensional Development and Inter-State Inequality in India in the 2000s

This chapter reports on an illustrative application of the method multidimensional development ranking built up in the preceding chapters. It poses the question whether in 2010–11 India was at a higher level of development than it had been in 2004–05. The choice of these specific years was motivated by the desire to investigate whether or how much the global financial crisisGlobal financial crisis of 2007 and 2008 affected the levels of inequality and development in the Indian economy. In a study of multidimensional development, data availability often constrains the choice of the years because the data on the different attributes often come from surveys conducted at different dates. 2010–11 was a compromise between the need to choose a post-crisis year and the need to ensure that dates of the data on the different attributes were as near to the chosen year as possible. Similarly, the reference year 2004–05 was a compromise between the need to choose a year prior to the global crisis (without going too far back in time) and the need to ensure that data on the different attributes related to this particular year or an adjacent one. It is seen that if we confine ourselves to inequality comparison by means of the conventional notion of Lorenz dominance, no definitive judgment is possible. The extended (fuzzy) version of Lorenz dominance developed in this book, however, helps us in getting around the problem of non-comparability.