IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/pra/mprapa/39318.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Income inequality in rural Pakistan-sources and decompositions

Author

Listed:
  • Shams, Khadija

Abstract

This paper analyses income inequalities in rural Pakistan. Using household survey data, we decompose income inequality according to its different sources. We calculate Gini coefficients and Theil indices both within and across provinces and districts. A partial correlation analysis extends our descriptive investigation to reveal the different impacts of the various income sources on overall income inequalities. The unique focus on rural areas and the more disaggregated (district level) approach permits more nuanced policy implications. We find that inequality between districts is higher than within districts. Non-farm and transfer income have the strongest impact on income inequality across districts both in economic and econometric terms. While the former source of income is inequality increasing, transfer income tends to reduce inequalities. Our results highlight in particular the need for factor mobility to facilitate transfer income.

Suggested Citation

  • Shams, Khadija, 2012. "Income inequality in rural Pakistan-sources and decompositions," MPRA Paper 39318, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    • Handle: RePEc:pra:mprapa:39318
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/39318/1/MPRA_paper_39318.pdf
    File Function: original version
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Adams, Richard H, Jr & Alderman, Harold, 1992. "Sources of Income Inequality in Rural Pakistan: A Decomposition Analysis," Oxford Bulletin of Economics and Statistics, Department of Economics, University of Oxford, vol. 54(4), pages 591-608, November.
    2. Hafiz A. PASHA & Tariq HASAN*, 1982. "Development Ranking Of Districts Of Pakistan," Pakistan Journal of Applied Economics, Applied Economics Research Centre, vol. 1(2), pages 157-192.
    3. Talat Anwar & Sarfraz K. Qureshi & Hammad Ali, 2004. "Landlessness and Rural Poverty in Pakistan," The Pakistan Development Review, Pakistan Institute of Development Economics, vol. 43(4), pages 855-874.
    4. Shorrocks, A F, 1982. "Inequality Decomposition by Factor Components," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 50(1), pages 193-211, January.
    5. Shorrocks, A F, 1980. "The Class of Additively Decomposable Inequality Measures," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 48(3), pages 613-625, April.
    6. Glewwe, Paul, 1986. "The distribution of income in Sri Lanka in 1969-1970 and 1980-1981 : A decomposition analysis," Journal of Development Economics, Elsevier, vol. 24(2), pages 255-274, December.
    7. Mehboob Ahmad, 2000. "Estimation of Distribution of Income in Pakistan, Using Micro Data," The Pakistan Development Review, Pakistan Institute of Development Economics, vol. 39(4), pages 807-824.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Khadija Shams & Alexander Kadow, 2020. "Income inequality, remittances and economic wellbeing in rural Pakistan: linkages and empirical evidence," Asia-Pacific Journal of Regional Science, Springer, vol. 4(2), pages 499-519, June.
    2. Alderman, Harold & Garcia, Marito, 1993. "Poverty, household food security, and nutrition in rural Pakistan:," Research reports 96, International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI).
    3. Alonso-Villar, Olga & del Río, Coral, 2010. "Local versus overall segregation measures," Mathematical Social Sciences, Elsevier, vol. 60(1), pages 30-38, July.
    4. Jolakoski, Petar & Pal, Arnab & Sandev, Trifce & Kocarev, Ljupco & Metzler, Ralf & Stojkoski, Viktor, 2023. "A first passage under resetting approach to income dynamics," Chaos, Solitons & Fractals, Elsevier, vol. 175(P1).
    5. Christos Koutsampelas & Panos Tsakloglou, 2013. "The distribution of full income in Greece," International Journal of Social Economics, Emerald Group Publishing Limited, vol. 40(4), pages 311-330, March.
    6. Teixidó Figueras, Jordi & Duro Moreno, Juan Antonio, 2012. "Ecological Footprint Inequality: A methodological review and some results," Working Papers 2072/203168, Universitat Rovira i Virgili, Department of Economics.
    7. Olga Alonso-Villar & Coral Del R�o, 2008. "Geographical Concentration of Unemployment: A Male-Female Comparison in Spain," Regional Studies, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 42(3), pages 401-412, April.
    8. Anton I. Votinov & Samvel S. Lazaryan & Vyacheslav N. Ovchinnikov, 2019. "Regression-Based Decomposition of Income Inequality Factors in Russia," Finansovyj žhurnal — Financial Journal, Financial Research Institute, Moscow 125375, Russia, issue 5, pages 74-89, October.
    9. Hu'e Sullivan & Hurlin Christophe & P'erignon Christophe & Saurin S'ebastien, 2022. "Measuring the Driving Forces of Predictive Performance: Application to Credit Scoring," Papers 2212.05866, arXiv.org, revised Jan 2025.
    10. Adams, Richard H., Jr., 1996. "Remittances, income distribution, and rural asset accumulation," FCND discussion papers 17, International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI).
    11. Babulo, Bedru & Muys, Bart & Nega, Fredu & Tollens, Eric & Nyssen, Jan & Deckers, Jozef & Mathijs, Erik, 2009. "The economic contribution of forest resource use to rural livelihoods in Tigray, Northern Ethiopia," Forest Policy and Economics, Elsevier, vol. 11(2), pages 123-131, March.
    12. Kilgarriff, Paul & McDermott, T.K.J. & Vega, Amaya & Morrissey , Karyn & O’Donoghue, Cathal, 2018. "Flooding disruption and the impact on the spatial distribution of commuter’s income," Working Papers 309608, National University of Ireland, Galway, Socio-Economic Marine Research Unit.
    13. Arthur Charpentier & Stéphane Mussard, 2011. "Income inequality games," The Journal of Economic Inequality, Springer;Society for the Study of Economic Inequality, vol. 9(4), pages 529-554, December.
    14. Marco Ranaldi, 2016. "On the Measurement of Functional Income Distribution," Documents de travail du Centre d'Economie de la Sorbonne 16051, Université Panthéon-Sorbonne (Paris 1), Centre d'Economie de la Sorbonne.
    15. Frank Cowell & Emmanuel Flachaire, 2021. "Inequality Measurement: Methods and Data," Post-Print hal-03589066, HAL.
    16. Mussard, Stéphane & Pi Alperin, Maria Noel, 2011. "Poverty growth in Scandinavian countries: A Sen multi-decomposition," Economic Modelling, Elsevier, vol. 28(6), pages 2842-2853.
    17. F. Chantreuil & A. Trannoy, 1999. "Inequality decomposition values : the trade-off between marginality and consistency," THEMA Working Papers 99-24, THEMA (THéorie Economique, Modélisation et Applications), Université de Cergy-Pontoise.
    18. SOLOGON Denisa & ALMEIDA Vanda & VAN KERM Philippe, 2019. "Accounting for the distributional effects of the 2007-2008 crisis and the Economic Adjustment Program in Portugal," LISER Working Paper Series 2019-05, Luxembourg Institute of Socio-Economic Research (LISER).
    19. Francesca Battisti & Francesco Porro, 2023. "A multi-decomposition of Zenga-84 inequality index: an application to the disparity in CO $$_2$$ 2 emissions in European countries," Statistical Methods & Applications, Springer;Società Italiana di Statistica, vol. 32(3), pages 957-981, September.
    20. Vani K. Borooah & John Mangan, 2012. "Measuring competitive balance in sports using generalized entropy with an application to English premier league football," Applied Economics, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 44(9), pages 1093-1102, March.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Income inequality; Gini coefficients; partial correlation; rural Pakistan;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • O15 - Economic Development, Innovation, Technological Change, and Growth - - Economic Development - - - Economic Development: Human Resources; Human Development; Income Distribution; Migration
    • Q15 - Agricultural and Natural Resource Economics; Environmental and Ecological Economics - - Agriculture - - - Land Ownership and Tenure; Land Reform; Land Use; Irrigation; Agriculture and Environment
    • O12 - Economic Development, Innovation, Technological Change, and Growth - - Economic Development - - - Microeconomic Analyses of Economic Development

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:pra:mprapa:39318. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Joachim Winter (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/vfmunde.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.