Analyzing Poverty and Inequality Dynamics across North-Eastern States of India

Abstract

This study intends to explore the poverty inequality dynamics across North Eastern States (NES) of India during recent decade. Based on NSSO’s Consumer Expenditure Survey Rounds an analysis has been carried out for two time points i.e. 2004-05 (61st round) and 2011-12 (68th round) to examine the changing pattern of poverty and inequality in these regions by decomposing changes in poverty in to growth, redistribution and interaction components. This paper used headcount ratio to measure poverty, Gini Index as well as poverty decomposition method (Datt and Ravallion, 1992) to quantify the relative contribution of economic growth and redistribution to changes in poverty. The results depict that the NES are quite different in terms of basic socioeconomic attributes from the mainland as per the level of development. As per the decomposition results the growth mean effect and redistribution component determines the rise or fall in the poverty effect. States where economic reforms were initiated properly with other developmental activities those NES performs better than the rest in terms of the said effects