Publication: Revisiting Between-Group Inequality Measurement: An Application to the Dynamics of Caste Inequality in Two Indian Villages
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Date
2011
ISSN
0305750X
Published
2011
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Standard approaches to decomposing how much group differences contribute to inequality rarely show significant between-group inequality, and are of limited use in comparing populations with different numbers of groups. We apply an adaptation to the standard approach that remedies these problems to longitudinal household data from two Indian villages-Palanpur in the north and Sugao in the west. In Palanpur we find that the largest Scheduled Caste group failed to share in the gradual rise in village prosperity. This would not have emerged from standard decomposition analysis. However, in Sugao the alternative procedure does not yield any additional insights because income gains have applied relatively evenly across castes.
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Publication Revisiting Between-group Inequality Measurement : An Application to the Dynamics of Caste Inequality in Two Indian villages(2010-06-01)Standard approaches to decomposing how much group differences contribute to inequality rarely show significant between-group inequality, and are of limited use in comparing populations with different numbers of groups. This study applies an adaptation to the standard approach that remedies these problems to longitudinal household data from two Indian villages -- Palanpur in the north, and Sugao in the west. The authors find that in Palanpur the largest scheduled caste group failed to share in the gradual rise in village prosperity. This would not have emerged from standard decomposition analysis. However, in Sugao the alternative procedure did not yield any additional insights because income gains applied relatively evenly across castes.Publication Reinterpreting Between-Group Inequality(2008)We evaluate observed inequality between population groups against a benchmark of the maximum between-group inequality attainable given the number and relative sizes of those groups under examination. Because our measure is normalized by these parameters, drawing comparisons across different settings is less problematic than with conventional inequality decompositions. Moreover, our measure can decline with finer sub-partitioning of population groups. Consequently, the exact manner in which one groups the population acquires greater significance. Survey data from various countries suggest that our approach can provide a complementary perspective on the question of whether (and how much) a particular population breakdown is salient to an assessment of inequality in a country.Publication Tokenism or Agency? The Impact of Women's Reservations on Village Democracies in South India(2008)There is increasing interest in whether improving the participation of women in government will lead to more gender equality. We test this with data collected from South India, using a natural experiment that randomly reserves one-third of all presidencies in democratically elected village councils (panchayats) for women candidates. Previous research has found that such "reservations" result in policy decisions that are closer to the preferences of women; qualitative research has argued, conversely, that it results in token appointments in which women are appointed by elites and are poorly educated and aged. We do not find evidence in favor of the tokenism hypothesis, finding that women leaders are drawn from the upper end of the quality distribution of women. However, we find that female leaders perform no differently than male leaders. Our results also indicate that institutional factors matter much more for women than for men: women perform better than men in situations in which they have more political experience and live in villages less dominated by upper castes.Publication Dignity through Discourse : Poverty and the Culture of Deliberation in Indian Village Democracies(2010)Employing a view of culture as a communicative phenomenon involving discursive engagement, the authors argue that the struggle to break free of poverty is as much a cultural process as it is political and economic. The authors analyze public meetings in Indian village democracies, gram sabhas, where villagers are constitutionally empowered to make decisions regarding budgetary allocations for village development and beneficiary selection for antipoverty programs. They examine 290 transcripts of gram sabhas from South India, looking at how they create a culture of civic/political engagement and how the definition of poverty is understood within them. They highlight how gram sabhas impart discursive skills and civic agency and illustrate how the poor deploy these skills in a resource-scarce and socially stratified environment. The intersection of poverty, culture, and deliberative democracy sheds light on cultural processes that can be influenced by public action in a manner that helps improve the voice and agency of the poor.Publication How Good Is a Map? Putting Small Area Estimation to the Test(2008)This paper examines the performance small area of welfare estimation. The method combines census and survey data to produce spatially disaggregated poverty and inequality estimates. To test the method, predicted welfare indicators for a set of target populations are compared with their true values. The target populations are constructed using actual data from a census of households in a set of rural Mexican communities. Estimates are examined along three criteria: accuracy of confidence intervals, bias and correlation with true values. We find that while point estimates are very stable, the precision of the estimates varies with alternative simulation methods. Precision of estimates is shown to diminish markedly if unobserved location effects at the village level are not well captured in underlying consumption models. With well specified models there is only slight evidence of bias, but we show that bias increases if underlying models fail to capture latent location effects.
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