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Hunger / HDI | Poverty and inequality
Poverty and inequality

Poverty and inequality

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According to the ADB report entitled: Asian Development Outlook 2012: Confronting Rising Inequality in Asia, http://www.adb.org/sites/default/files/pub/2012/ado2012.pdf:

•    Poverty as measured by head count ratio may have dropped in India by 7.3 percentage points from 37.2% in 2004-05 to 29.8% in 2009-10 but the decline could have been much more had the country been more equal. To the dismay of pro market economists, the report tells that had inequality remained unchanged from the 1990s to the 2000s, the poverty headcount rate in India could have been brought down to 29.5% in 2008, instead of the actual 32.7%.

•    It is a widely held belief that growth ultimately trickles down to the poor living at the bottom, thus reducing poverty. However, the new report finds that rising inequality due to growth has affected poverty reduction.

•    People’s Republic of China (PRC) and India—the world’s two most populous countries—with annual GDP growth rates of 9.9% and 6.4%, respectively have witnessed rise in inequality from the early 1990s to the late 2000s. During the period of economic reforms, Gini coefficient*—a common measure of inequality—deteriorated from 32.4 in 1990 to 43.4 in 2008 in the PRC and from 32.5 in 1993 to 37 in 2010 in India.

•    In  India,  the urban Gini  grew  from  34.4  in  1993  to  39.3  in 2010, much faster than the contemporaneous growth of the rural Gini, from 28.6 to 30.5. India’s rural inequality is lower and urban inequality is higher than in the PRC and, unlike the PRC but like most developing countries, India’s urban inequality is higher than its rural inequality.

•    The yawning gap between the rich and the poor in India could be observed from the ratio of the per capita expenditure of the top 20% to that of the bottom 20%. The quintile ratio has increased from 4.8 in 1993 to 5.7 in 2010. In India, the annual mean per capita expenditure growth was only 1.1% for the bottom quintile but 1.9% for the top quintile during 1993-2010. Rising inequality in India has been driven by income redistribution to the top 20%, at a cost to the bottom 80%.

•    The average annual growth rate of labor productivity was 7.4% during 1990–2007, while average annual real wage growth rate was only 2%. Gains in productivity were not passed on to wages and, consequently, the labor share of India’s organized manufacturing sector declined from 37% in 1990 to 22% in mid 2007 in India.

•    Wage employment elasticity of growth fell from 0.44 in 1991–2001 to 0.28 in 2001–2011 in PRC and from 0.53 to 0.41 in the case of India thus showing jobless growth.

•    Income inequality is caused by inequality of opportunity in developing Asia. Inequality of opportunity arises out of unequal access to public services, especially education and health. In some Asian countries including India where the average proportion of out-of-school primary school-age children was about 20% in 1999–2003, children from the poorest quintile were three times as likely as those from the richest quintile to be out of school. Infant mortality rates among the poorest households in some Asian countries were double or treble the rates among the richest households. The chance of a poor infant dying at birth was more than 10 times higher than for an infant born to a rich family in Asia.

•    Although average Gini coefficient across developing Asian economies (38) was lower than that in Latin American economies (52), most Latin American countries have seen narrowing inequality in the last 2 decades.

* Note: A Gini of zero denotes absolute equality, while a value of 1 (or 100 on the percentile scale) means absolute inequality.


 

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