-Down to Earth Income inequality makes agrarian crisis challenging; inequality is worse among farmers than the formal economy Economists Lucas Chancel and Thomas Piketty recently concluded after a long study that inequality is at its peak in India. It is embedded in popular conscience: “Top 1 per cent of earners captured 22 per cent of total income in the country.” Their study–covering consumption, government accounts and income tax data from 1922...
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The return of India's super rich -Rishabh Kumar
-Livemint.com The trajectory of wealth concentration in the country, not just the levels of recently estimated inequality, is important A flurry of estimates regarding Indian inequality have captured public interest recently. Whether one believes the wealth inequality numbers presented by Credit Suisse or the distributional income accounts by Lucas Chancel and Thomas Piketty, evidence seems to state that India has high economic disparities. But inequality is to be expected in a developing...
More »Lucas Chancel, economist working on inequality, interviewed by Sanjay Vijayakumar (The Hindu)
-The Hindu The top 1% of earners captured less than 21% of total income in the late 1930s, before dropping to 6% in the early 1980s and rising to 22% today, says renowned economist Lucas Chancel According to a research paper by renowned economists Thomas Piketty and Lucas Chancel, income inequality in India is at its highest level since 1922, the year the Income Tax Act was passed. In December, they will...
More »Case for targeted basic income -Puja Mehra
-The Hindu The idea of a basic income is not new. The first known suggestion on an unconditional universal basic income for all adults regardless of other income sources was from Thomas More. Centuries later, in 1918, Bertrand Russell discussed a basic income sufficient for necessities as central to the social model combining the advantages of anarchism and socialism that he argued for in Proposed Roads to Freedom. “A certain small...
More »The majority at the margins -Jayati Ghosh
-The Indian Express Protests by the people against inequality are producing governments that move exactly in the opposite direction We all know that the world is an unequal place, both across and within countries. We also know that across the world, people are expressing their anger and disgust at this inequality. This is increasingly revealed in extreme and often paradoxical political results. In the US, a vote against the establishment has just...
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