Public education expenditure and food inequality in rural India: an analysis in major states of India during 1983-2012

Abstract

Economic inequality in the distribution of wealth or income continues to be a very serious problem for any community. Economic inequality can be captured by different families of inequality measures of which two are very popular and convenient - the Gini family and the SD-CV family. Inequality measures in any family may be of three types - relative, absolute and index measures of inequality. A serious question is that, what type of inequality do we want to reduce - relative or absolute? If we really want to reduce inequality, we should consider both relative and absolute measures of inequality. For India, inequality is measured for consumer expenditure of households with the help of data collected by National Sample Survey Organisation (NSSO) which divides household's total expenditure into two broad categories - food and non-food items. Income/expenditure inequality occurs due to many reasons/factors. Education expenditure is one of the important factors. Using panel data for 15 major states of rural India for the period 1983-2012, this paper empirically examines whether public expenditure on education succeeds to reduce food inequality or not.