On 5:53 PM, Ingrid wrote: > The merits of this article aside, Gini coefficients, that measure income > inequality, have risen steadily in India since 1980 from 0.32 to 0.38.
Okay, so as expected, the gap is widening. Though, from what I understand about Gini coefficients from Wikipedia, a country as large as India with its economic diversity would end up exaggerating the value. To quote Wikipedia -- "When measuring its value for a large, economically diverse country, a much higher coefficient than each of its regions has individually will result." But, in any case, assuming that supply-side economics works, if this ends up getting us closer to a place where most of the "poor" have their own homes and mobile phones and air-conditioning, is the income disparity all *that* bad? > What really makes India different are: > 1. the sheer numbers of people living in poverty. The percentages living on > less than USD 2 per day have declined by less than 10% from 89.6% to > 79.9%over the same 20 year period. At > 1.5 billion, that's about 1.2 billion. Not to dispute the fact there the majority of the Indian population is extremely poor, but there has got to be a better measure of this than one based on a foreign currency against which the domestic currency fluctuates wildly, and this before we throw inflation into the mix. I would assume proxy measures like life expectancy and child mortality rates would work much better. A totally naive reading (in the economic sense) of the figures above seems to indicate that, ignoring the effects of inflation, 89.6% of the people used to live on less than 30 rupees a day 20 years ago -- and now 79.9% of the people live on less than 90 rupees a day. Have no idea how inflation would skew these numbers but superficially, it looks like a decline of greater than 10%. [Disclaimer: I am bandying about terms which I have a little more than passing familiarity with. I'll be very glad if someone who actually understands numbers can clear this up for me.] In any case, even accepting these figures at face-value, the poor do seem to be getting richer - though at a slower pace than the rest of the country -- which was the original point. Venky.
