IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/arx/papers/1507.04236.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Invariant features of spatial inequality in consumption: the case of India

Author

Listed:
  • Arnab Chatterjee
  • Anindya S. Chakrabarti
  • Asim Ghosh
  • Anirban Chakraborti
  • Tushar K. Nandi

Abstract

We study the distributional features and inequality of consumption expenditure across India, for different states, castes, religion and urban-rural divide. We find that even though the aggregate measures of inequality are fairly diversified across states, the consumption distributions show near identical statistics, once properly normalized. This feature is seen to be robust with respect to variations in sociological and economic factors. We also show that state-wise inequality seems to be positively correlated with growth which is in accord with the traditional idea of Kuznets' curve. We present a brief model to account for the invariance found empirically and show that better but riskier technology draws can create a positive correlation between inequality and growth.

Suggested Citation

  • Arnab Chatterjee & Anindya S. Chakrabarti & Asim Ghosh & Anirban Chakraborti & Tushar K. Nandi, 2015. "Invariant features of spatial inequality in consumption: the case of India," Papers 1507.04236, arXiv.org, revised Sep 2015.
    • Handle: RePEc:arx:papers:1507.04236
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://arxiv.org/pdf/1507.04236
    File Function: Latest version
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. repec:bla:revinw:v:38:y:1992:i:2:p:225-36 is not listed on IDEAS
    2. Anindya S. Chakrabarti & Bikas K. Chakrabarti, 2010. "Inequality reversal: effects of the savings propensity and correlated returns," Papers 1005.3518, arXiv.org.
    3. Sinha, Sitabhra, 2006. "Evidence for power-law tail of the wealth distribution in India," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 359(C), pages 555-562.
    4. Drăgulescu, Adrian & Yakovenko, Victor M., 2001. "Exponential and power-law probability distributions of wealth and income in the United Kingdom and the United States," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 299(1), pages 213-221.
    5. Angle, John & Nielsen, Francois & Scalas, Enrico, 2009. "The Kuznets Curve and the Inequality Process," MPRA Paper 16058, University Library of Munich, Germany, revised 29 Jun 2009.
    6. Inoue, Jun-ichi & Ghosh, Asim & Chatterjee, Arnab & Chakrabarti, Bikas K., 2015. "Measuring social inequality with quantitative methodology: Analytical estimates and empirical data analysis by Gini and k indices," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 429(C), pages 184-204.
    7. Anand Banerjee & Victor M. Yakovenko, 2009. "Universal patterns of inequality," Papers 0912.4898, arXiv.org, revised Apr 2010.
    8. Erich Battistin & Richard Blundell & Arthur Lewbel, 2009. "Why Is Consumption More Log Normal than Income? Gibrat's Law Revisited," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 117(6), pages 1140-1154, December.
    9. Padmaja Mishra & Ashok Parikh, 1992. "Household Consumer Expenditure Inequalities In India: A Decomposition Analysis," Review of Income and Wealth, International Association for Research in Income and Wealth, vol. 38(2), pages 225-236, June.
    10. Richard Blundell & Luigi Pistaferri & Ian Preston, 2008. "Consumption Inequality and Partial Insurance," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 98(5), pages 1887-1921, December.
    11. Ghosh, Abhik & Gangopadhyay, Kausik & Basu, B., 2011. "Consumer expenditure distribution in India, 1983–2007: Evidence of a long Pareto tail," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 390(1), pages 83-97.
    12. Kanbur, Ravi, 2012. "Does Kuznets Still Matter?," Working Papers 128794, Cornell University, Department of Applied Economics and Management.
    13. Dirk Krueger & Fabrizio Perri, 2006. "Does Income Inequality Lead to Consumption Inequality? Evidence and Theory -super-1," The Review of Economic Studies, Review of Economic Studies Ltd, vol. 73(1), pages 163-193.
    14. Satya R. Chakravarty, 2009. "Inequality, Polarization and Poverty," Economic Studies in Inequality, Social Exclusion, and Well-Being, Springer, number 978-0-387-79253-8, January.
    15. A. Chatterjee & B. K. Chakrabarti, 2007. "Kinetic exchange models for income and wealth distributions," The European Physical Journal B: Condensed Matter and Complex Systems, Springer;EDP Sciences, vol. 60(2), pages 135-149, November.
    16. Giorgio Fagiolo & Lucia Alessi & Matteo Barigozzi & Marco Capasso, 2010. "On the distributional properties of household consumption expenditures: the case of Italy," Empirical Economics, Springer, vol. 38(3), pages 717-741, June.
    17. Arnab Chatterjee & Bikas K. Chakrabarti, 2007. "Kinetic Exchange Models for Income and Wealth Distributions," Papers 0709.1543, arXiv.org, revised Nov 2007.
    18. Jayadev, Arjun, 2008. "A power law tail in India's wealth distribution: Evidence from survey data," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 387(1), pages 270-276.
    19. repec:cup:cbooks:9781107013445 is not listed on IDEAS
    20. Eliazar, Iddo & Cohen, Morrel H., 2014. "On social inequality: Analyzing the rich–poor disparity," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 401(C), pages 148-158.
    21. Mizuno, Takayuki & Toriyama, Masahiro & Terano, Takao & Takayasu, Misako, 2008. "Pareto law of the expenditure of a person in convenience stores," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 387(15), pages 3931-3935.
    22. Chakrabarti, Anindya S. & Chakrabarti, Bikas K., 2010. "Inequality reversal: Effects of the savings propensity and correlated returns," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 389(17), pages 3572-3579.
    23. Victor M. Yakovenko & J. Barkley Rosser, 2009. "Colloquium: Statistical mechanics of money, wealth, and income," Papers 0905.1518, arXiv.org, revised Dec 2009.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

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


    Cited by:

    1. Anand Sahasranaman & Henrik Jeldtoft Jensen, 2021. "Dynamics of reallocation within India’s income distribution," Indian Economic Review, Springer, vol. 56(1), pages 1-23, June.
    2. Kiran Sharma & Anirban Chakraborti, 2016. "Physicists' approach to studying socio-economic inequalities: Can humans be modelled as atoms?," Papers 1606.06051, arXiv.org, revised Aug 2018.
    3. Anindya S. Chakrabarti & Arnab Chatterjee & Tushar Nandi & Asim Ghosh & Anirban Chakraborti, 2018. "Quantifying invariant features of within-group inequality in consumption across groups," Journal of Economic Interaction and Coordination, Springer;Society for Economic Science with Heterogeneous Interacting Agents, vol. 13(3), pages 469-490, October.
    4. Chatterjee, Arnab & Ghosh, Asim & Chakrabarti, Bikas K., 2017. "Socio-economic inequality: Relationship between Gini and Kolkata indices," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 466(C), pages 583-595.
    5. Anand Sahasranaman, 2020. "Long term dynamics of poverty transitions in India," Papers 2010.06954, arXiv.org.
    6. Aadil Ahmad Ganaie & Sajad ahmad Bhat & Bandi Kamaiah, 2018. "Macro-determinants of Income Inequality: An Empirical Analysis in case of India," Economics Bulletin, AccessEcon, vol. 38(1), pages 309-325.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Ghosh, Asim & Chatterjee, Arnab & Inoue, Jun-ichi & Chakrabarti, Bikas K., 2016. "Inequality measures in kinetic exchange models of wealth distributions," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 451(C), pages 465-474.
    2. Chatterjee, Arnab & Ghosh, Asim & Chakrabarti, Bikas K., 2017. "Socio-economic inequality: Relationship between Gini and Kolkata indices," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 466(C), pages 583-595.
    3. Aydiner, Ekrem & Cherstvy, Andrey G. & Metzler, Ralf, 2018. "Wealth distribution, Pareto law, and stretched exponential decay of money: Computer simulations analysis of agent-based models," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 490(C), pages 278-288.
    4. Costas Efthimiou & Adam Wearne, 2016. "Household Income Distribution in the USA," Papers 1602.06234, arXiv.org.
    5. Max Greenberg & H. Oliver Gao, 2024. "Twenty-five years of random asset exchange modeling," The European Physical Journal B: Condensed Matter and Complex Systems, Springer;EDP Sciences, vol. 97(6), pages 1-27, June.
    6. Soriano-Hernández, P. & del Castillo-Mussot, M. & Campirán-Chávez, I. & Montemayor-Aldrete, J.A., 2017. "Wealth of the world’s richest publicly traded companies per industry and per employee: Gamma, Log-normal and Pareto power-law as universal distributions?," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 471(C), pages 733-749.
    7. Aloys Prinz, 2016. "Do capitalistic institutions breed billionaires?," Empirical Economics, Springer, vol. 51(4), pages 1319-1332, December.
    8. Blair Fix, 2018. "Hierarchy and the power-law income distribution tail," Journal of Computational Social Science, Springer, vol. 1(2), pages 471-491, September.
    9. Chakrabarti, Anindya S., 2011. "An almost linear stochastic map related to the particle system models of social sciences," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 390(23), pages 4370-4378.
    10. Brzezinski, Michal, 2014. "Do wealth distributions follow power laws? Evidence from ‘rich lists’," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 406(C), pages 155-162.
    11. Chakrabarti, Anindya S. & Chakrabarti, Bikas K., 2010. "Inequality reversal: Effects of the savings propensity and correlated returns," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 389(17), pages 3572-3579.
    12. Gao, Li, 2015. "Evolution of consumption distribution and model of wealth distribution in China between 1995 and 2012," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 429(C), pages 76-86.
    13. Victor M. Yakovenko, 2012. "Applications of statistical mechanics to economics: Entropic origin of the probability distributions of money, income, and energy consumption," Papers 1204.6483, arXiv.org.
    14. Anindya S. Chakrabarti, 2011. "An almost linear stochastic map related to the particle system models of social sciences," Papers 1101.3617, arXiv.org, revised Mar 2011.
    15. Anindya S. Chakrabarti & Bikas K. Chakrabarti, 2010. "Inequality reversal: effects of the savings propensity and correlated returns," Papers 1005.3518, arXiv.org.
    16. Boghosian, Bruce M. & Devitt-Lee, Adrian & Johnson, Merek & Li, Jie & Marcq, Jeremy A. & Wang, Hongyan, 2017. "Oligarchy as a phase transition: The effect of wealth-attained advantage in a Fokker–Planck description of asset exchange," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 476(C), pages 15-37.
    17. Sokolov, Andrey & Melatos, Andrew & Kieu, Tien, 2010. "Laplace transform analysis of a multiplicative asset transfer model," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 389(14), pages 2782-2792.
    18. Thitithep Sitthiyot & Kanyarat Holasut, 2024. "Income distribution in Thailand is scale-invariant," Papers 2402.01141, arXiv.org.
    19. Maria Letizia Bertotti & Amit K Chattopadhyay & Giovanni Modanese, 2017. "Economic inequality and mobility for stochastic models with multiplicative noise," Papers 1702.08391, arXiv.org.
    20. Schulz, Jan & Mayerhoffer, Daniel M., 2021. "A network approach to consumption," BERG Working Paper Series 173, Bamberg University, Bamberg Economic Research Group.

    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:arx:papers:1507.04236. 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.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with 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: arXiv administrators (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://arxiv.org/ .

    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.