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1 – 10 of over 16000Sabyasachi Kar, Debajit Jha and Alpana Kateja
The purpose of this paper is to study the dynamics of the distribution of per capita income of Indian states in the post‐reform period, in order to identify trends towards…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to study the dynamics of the distribution of per capita income of Indian states in the post‐reform period, in order to identify trends towards convergence‐club formation, polarization or stratification during this period.
Design/methodology/approach
The authors adopt the “distribution dynamics” framework that involves estimating kernel density functions, stochastic kernels and ergodic distributions in order to identify these trends.
Findings
The results show that there is polarization in India in the post‐reform period and this is due to the contrary growth dynamics of the middle‐income states resulting in the “vanishing middle” of the distribution.
Originality/value
This is the first study that highlights the contrary growth dynamics among the middle‐income states as the driving force behind the polarization of Indian states in the post‐reform period.
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Shujie Yao, Zongyi Zhang and Gengfu Feng
Fast growth in China has led to significant improvement in people's living standards and average income. However, it has also brought about a huge rise in inequality. The purpose…
Abstract
Purpose
Fast growth in China has led to significant improvement in people's living standards and average income. However, it has also brought about a huge rise in inequality. The purpose of this paper is to analyse regional and rural‐urban inequality using a few income and consumption indicators.
Design/methodology/approach
Data are collected from official statistical sources for all the Chinese provinces over 1978‐1995. Both parametric and non‐parametric methods are used to study the inequality between regions and between the rural and urban sub‐populations. The parametric approach is to test whether per capita incomes among provinces converged over time. The non‐parametric approach is the calculation and decomposition of the Gini coefficient by population sub‐group and income source.
Findings
The results show no evidence of growth convergence in per capita GDP, income and expenditure across provinces, but clear evidence of divergence in per capita rural (and urban) incomes and total expenditures. Three‐quarters of inter‐provincial income inequality are explained by inter‐rural/urban inequality. Inter‐provincial inequality explains more than half of rural inequality and less than half of urban inequality in most years.
Originality/value
This paper uses one of the most complicated datasets for the Chinese regions. It studies inequality using different economic indicators. It considers the different dimensions of inequality in China using two different approaches. The results are important for regional development policies.
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Ida Bagus Putu Purbadharmaja, Maryunani, Candra Fajri Ananda and Dwi Budi Santoso
The purpose of this study is to investigate the relationship between government and Balinese society in tax decentralization through budgeting seem to insignificantly improve the…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this study is to investigate the relationship between government and Balinese society in tax decentralization through budgeting seem to insignificantly improve the welfare of Balinese society.
Design methodology/approach
This research was conducted in Bali Province involving eight regencies and one city. The data used in this study were secondary data, derived from relevant institutions or from websites through internet browsing and other documentations in the form of official reports/publications, such as regional budget, accountability reports, regional regulations and documents on budget and development of the regional economy. The present research used the partial least squares analysis technique.
Findings
Fiscal decentralization does not necessarily lead to better budget management. The success of fiscal decentralization can be found in the quality of the regional budget and the quality of budget management. The allocation of the regional budget for public service improvement and the development of infrastructure will increase the economic capacity of the regions. Improvement in regional economic capacity encourages the improvement of community welfare.
Originality/value
This income inequality points to the issue of fiscal capacity. The development of the financial role of district/city regions in the Province of Bali remains at a level gap with the development level of community welfare. During this period, the financial role of the government as estimated from the ratio of the national budget to the regional budget is higher than that of the society development. The acceleration role of the government is not proportional to the development of Human Development Index outcomes.
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The purpose of this paper is to quantify the effects of regional income disparity and social diversity on local public goods delivery in Indonesia.
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to quantify the effects of regional income disparity and social diversity on local public goods delivery in Indonesia.
Design/methodology/approach
Using Indonesian provincial data over the period 2001–2014 and by way of System GMM, this paper circumvents endogeneity and persistence of key variables over time which may bias the estimated impact of the critical variables.
Findings
The result provides no significant evidence on the influence of regional income inequality on the provision of local public goods. The result reveals that ethnic diversity is associated with the more extensive provision of local public goods. A large difference in preferences toward public goods provision in a fragmented society such as Indonesia forces the local government to deliver a greater mixed of public goods to accommodate various preferences for public goods and ensure that each group has equal access to public goods. Political fragmentation within an ethnically heterogeneous society also encourages local politicians to provide a larger provision of public goods to form an inter-ethnic coalition to gain local political access.
Practical implications
The significant effect of ethnic diversity on public goods provision implies a set of policy recommendation for Indonesian Government in order to maintain peace within the country. The central government should establish a clear-cut standard of local public goods provision for local governments to ensure that that anyone has equal access to public goods regardless of ethnicity. This will mitigate the possibility of ethnic conflict in an ethnically plural society.
Originality/value
This paper extends its analysis using both fractionalization and polarization indexes to measure the social diversity in Indonesia to obtain a comprehensive knowledge regarding the influence of ethnic diversity on the public good provision. This paper proposes a set of policy recommendation for Indonesian Government to manage the effect of social diversity on the provision of local public goods. To the author’s knowledge, this has never been done before for Indonesia.
Peer review
The peer review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/IJSE-12-2018-0661
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Francisco J. Goerlich and Matilde Mas
This paper focuses on three (marginal?) questions surrounding the analysis of economic convergence and uses Spanish provinces as a means of illustration. The three questions in…
Abstract
This paper focuses on three (marginal?) questions surrounding the analysis of economic convergence and uses Spanish provinces as a means of illustration. The three questions in hand are as follows. Given that the geographical units of analysis are usually quite different in economic size, is the weighting of economic units relevant in convergence analysis? The average per capita income of a given region, or country, is the first moment in the distribution of income, but what about the second moment, inequality, have we converged in inequality? An aggregate welfare index must take into account, at least, the evolution of the first two moments of the distribution of income, and so does the adjustment for inequality make important differences in the evolution of average per capita income? The answer to the first two questions is yes, but to the third it is clearly no.
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This paper aims to estimate a set of welfare weights for Turkey, based on per capita regional incomes, and to present them for possible policy consideration by the government.
Abstract
Purpose
This paper aims to estimate a set of welfare weights for Turkey, based on per capita regional incomes, and to present them for possible policy consideration by the government.
Design/methodology/approach
An important component of the regional welfare weight measure is the elasticity of marginal utility of income (e), and it is estimated using a tax‐based method incorporating the principle of equal absolute sacrifice of satisfaction.
Findings
The estimated measure of e for Turkey is 1.25, and this value, in combination with per capita income levels, produces measured regional welfare weights for the poorest provinces that are over ten times as high as those for the richest provinces.
Research limitations/implications
A lack of suitable data makes it difficult to use alternative approaches to the tax‐based method for the purpose of cross checking results for e. Results based on these other approaches involving behavioural evidence are presented for some other countries for comparison purposes.
Originality/value
This paper presents estimates of regional welfare weights for Turkey based on sound economic principles. It will be of interest to academics who are concerned with issues relating to cost‐benefit analysis as well as practitioners who are involved in the allocation of public funds to different regions in Turkey.
Justin Doran and Declan Jordan
The purpose of this paper is to analyse income inequality for a sample of 14 European countries and their composite regions using data from the Cambridge Econometrics regional…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to analyse income inequality for a sample of 14 European countries and their composite regions using data from the Cambridge Econometrics regional dataset from 1980 to 2009. The purpose of the paper is to provide insight into the dynamics of regional and national cohesion among the EU‐14 countries studied.
Design/methodology/approach
Initially, inequality is decomposed using the Theil coefficient into between and within country inequality to assess the extent to which convergence has occurred. To investigate the underlying causes of the changes in inequality, the Theil coefficient is further decomposed to assess the contribution of productivity and employment‐population ratio differentials to inequality.
Findings
The results indicate that while between‐country inequality has declined, within‐country inequality has increased by approximately 50 percent. Subsequent decomposition indicates that while productivity levels among regions have converged, the employment‐population ratios have diverged substantially driving increasing levels of inequality. This suggests that while EU cohesion policies have reduced productivity inequalities they have had little effect in stimulating convergence of employment‐population ratios across regions.
Research limitations/implications
The paper argues that national priorities, particularly in the context of the current European economic crisis, are likely to hinder European Union level policies to reduce income inequality at a regional level. This may result in further increases in regional inequality among European regions.
Originality/value
This paper's main contribution is to highlight how national convergence can lead to regional divergence being overlooked. The value of the paper is that it provides policy insights, based on empirical evidence, for European cohesion policy.
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Mohammed Touitou, Laib Yacine and Boudeghdegh Ahmed
Despite significant progress in schooling, social and spatial inequalities in access to education remain important in Algeria. In the present article, taking into account the…
Abstract
Purpose
Despite significant progress in schooling, social and spatial inequalities in access to education remain important in Algeria. In the present article, taking into account the geographic dimension makes it possible to identify the links existing between spatial location and disparities in the field of education in Algeria. Also, three types of education indicators (quantity, quality and inequality) are used in the study. The study’s sample includes 48 Algerian provinces, studied between 2008 and 2018.
Design/methodology/approach
In this study, the authors used data from the 2008 and 2018 General Census of Population and Housing (GCPH) for 48 provinces. Indeed, the two censuses of 2008 and 2018 (sources of data for this study) were based on questionnaires intended for different categories of the population (households, non-household populations, transit population, etc.). Therefore, the no response rate is assumed to be close to 0. Using spatial econometric techniques.
Findings
Results indicate that the indicator used is strong spatial disparity in education in Algeria. The development of a spatial synthetic index (SI) makes it possible to measure more precisely the extent and nature of spatial disparities in the field of education in Algeria. The results also confirm the hypothesis of β-convergence of the performance of the Algerian education system. Consequently, the need for policies to reduce the unfair inequalities between different areas is apparent.
Originality/value
Works that analyze education indicators in a classical perspective (educational performances between different sexes and between rural and urban areas) are abundant (Amaghouss and Ibourk, 2013a). However, very few studies proceed to the analysis of educational variables in a spatial perspective (Catin and Hazem, 2012). To the best of the authors’ knowledge, no work has tried to analyze spatial disparities in the field of education in Algeria.
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Luciano Nakabashi, Ana Elisa Gonçalves Pereira and Adolfo Sachsida
The Brazilian municipalities show a huge disparity in income level. The GDP per capita difference between the richest and the poorest municipalities is about 190 times, according…
Abstract
Purpose
The Brazilian municipalities show a huge disparity in income level. The GDP per capita difference between the richest and the poorest municipalities is about 190 times, according to IBGE (2000) database. This paper aims to analyze the impacts of Brazilian municipalities institutional quality on their levels of per capita income.
Design/methodology/approach
Institutionalist theory provides a plausible explanation for the gap among municipalities income level. Many empirical studies based on cross-country data have found a high correlation between institutional quality and the level of economic development, but there is little research concerning the extreme inequality within the national territory and its relationship with institutional quality. The theory suggests that the institutions matter for the level of economic development because of their effects on political power distribution, generation of economic opportunities, innovation, human capital accumulation, and so on.
Findings
Overall, an increase by one point in the average quality of the institutions is able to increase the average GDP per capita around 20 percent. This means that each point of increase in the quality of the municipality institutions is able to increase the municipality GDP per capita by R$1,000 (around US$600).
Originality/value
This is an important research that sheds light to the importance of institutional quality at local level and its influence over growth in a developing country.
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Arshad Ahmad Khan, Sufyan Ullah Khan, Muhammad Abu Sufyan Ali, Aftab Khan, Yousaf Hayat and Jianchao Luo
The main aim of this study is to investigate the impact of climate change and water salinity on farmer’s income risk with future outlook mitigation. Salinity and climate change…
Abstract
Purpose
The main aim of this study is to investigate the impact of climate change and water salinity on farmer’s income risk with future outlook mitigation. Salinity and climate change are a threat to agricultural productivity worldwide. However, the combined effects of climate change and salinity impacts on farmers' income are not well understood, particularly in developing countries.
Design/methodology/approach
The response-yield function and general maximum entropy methods were used to predict the impact of temperature, precipitation and salinity on crop yield. The target minimization of total absolute deviations (MOTAD)-positive mathematical programming model was used to simulate the impact of climate change and salinity on socioeconomic and environmental indicators. In the end, a multicriteria decision-making model was used, aiming at the selection of suitable climate scenarios.
Findings
The results revealed that precipitation shows a significantly decreasing trend, while temperature and groundwater salinity (EC) illustrate a significantly increasing trend. Climate change and EC negatively impact the farmer's income and water shadow prices. Maximum reduction in income and water shadow prices was observed for A2 scenario (−12.4% and 19.4%) during 2050. The environmental index was the most important, with priority of 43.4% compared to socioeconomic indicators. Subindex amount of water used was also significant in study area, with 28.1% priority. The technique for order preference by similarity to ideal solution ranking system found that B1 was the best climatic scenario for adopting climate change adaptation in the research region.
Originality/value
In this study, farmers' income threats were assessed with the aspects of different climate scenario (A1, A1B and B1) over the horizons of 2030, 2040 and 2050 and three different indicators (economic, social and environmental) in Northwestern region of Pakistan. Only in arid and semiarid regions has climate change raised temperature and reduced rainfall, which are preliminary symptoms of growing salinity.
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