期刊名称：Discussion Papers / Norwegian School of Economics and Business Administration
印刷版ISSN：0804-6824
出版年度：2016
卷号：2016
出版社：Bergen
摘要：It is well known that people's consumption patterns change with income. Relative pricechanges therefore a ect rich and poor consumers di erently. Yet, the standard price indices arenot income-speci c and hence, the use of these mask these di erences in cost-of-living. In thispaper, we study consumption inequality in India, while fully allowing for non-homotheticity.Our analysis shows that the changes in relative prices in a large part of the period from 1993to 2012 were pro-poor, in the sense that they favored the poor relative to the rich. As a result,we also nd that the standard measures signi cantly overestimate the rise in real inequality.Moreover, we show that the allowance for non-homotheticity is quantitatively much more im-portant in our application than the adjustment for substitution in consumption, despite thelarger attention paid to the latter in the literature. We also illustrate how conventional mea-sures exaggerate inter-temporal changes in inequality when there is segregation in consump-tion/production, by which we mean that people's consumption patterns are skewed towardsgoods intensively produced by people of their own group.
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