Tuesday, January 04, 2022

India’s income inequality fell post 2020 lockdown as rich got poorer, US economic study shows

Non-peer-reviewed paper by US-based non-profit NBER says pandemic brought decline in inequality in two senses, the second being consumption inequality also fell marginally.

NIKHIL RAMPAL
4 January, 2022 
File photo | A view of the Outer Ring Road as shot with a drone camera during coronavirus lockdown in Bengaluru | PTI

New Delhi: Millions of Indians were pushed into poverty during the Covid-19 pandemic, but the period post the initial strict lockdown also saw a decline in income inequality in the country, a working paper published last month has said.

The paper, titled ‘Inequality in India declined during Covid’, published by the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), a US-based non-profit that focuses on conducting and disseminating research on economics, said the pandemic in India was associated with a decline in inequality in two senses. The first was that Indians from higher income groups had larger relative reductions in income than the poor, and the second was that consumption inequality also declined, albeit only marginally so.

The non-peer reviewed study was led by three scholars — Arpit Gupta from the Stern School of Business, University of New York, and Anup Malani and Bartosz Woda from the University of Chicago Law School.

The researchers’ main source of data was the Consumer Pyramids Household Survey (CPHS),

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