Impact of economic inequality in the indian context

Abstract

With the help of this project, we tried to explore the economic inequalities present at the district level of a country, our country of choice being India and the impact of those economic inequalities on various economic and social variables like health, education, crime etc. We started with calculating Income and Consumption Gini coefficients to understand the inequality present at the regional level. The sample sets were taken from Indian Health Development Survey website (http://www.ihds.umd.edu/), as the data was readily available. The website provided us data containing various variables at individual, household, district and state level. Later we went on to find the correlation between Income and Consumption patterns at the regional level. Finally, we regressed various social and economic metrics with respect to economic inequality to analyze the extent of dependency of these variables. The various metrics which we considered for analysis are health, education, poverty rate, trust in institutions, and crime. From the analysis, average per capita household income, education, crime have positive relation where as some metrics of health and trust in institutions have negative relation and the rest do not have considerable level of significance.