Revisiting Inequality: Theoretical and Methodological Advances with Empirical Examples from India

This volume discusses the current state of knowledge on the conceptual understanding of inequality. The book poses a range of empirical puzzles in the Indian context and examines inequalities across categories of the region of residence, caste, and sex, using a fascinating range of outcome indicators, comprising education, health, earnings, self-employment, and crime.

The empirical chapters of this volume use various large-scale secondary data sources to expose the deep-rooted, structural inequalities in the Indian society. It answers some of the pertinent questions around inequality such as why do the backward regions of India continue to remain backward, both in terms of economic and human development indicators? Why do enterprises owned by backward caste individuals have systematically lower business earnings? Are backward castes and women more likely to face crime when their relative status improves? How do the circumstances that children find given at birth influence their learning outcomes? etc.

The book will be of interest to teachers, students, and researchers of economics of education, development studies, development economics, and Indian economics. It will also be useful for policymakers, academicians, and anyone curious to learn about inequality.

Achin Chakraborty is a Professor of Economics and the Director at Institute of Development Studies Kolkata (IDSK). He was a visiting professor at Sciences Po, Paris, and was a CICOPS Fellow at the University of Pavia, Italy. He has published widely in peer-reviewed journals including Economic Theory, BMJ Global Health, Social Indicators Research, Economics Bulletin, Journal of Quantitative Economics, Environment and Development Economics. He co-edited three books - The Land Question in India: State, Dispossession and Capitalist Transition (OUP, 2017), Changing Contexts and Shifting Roles of the Indian State (Springer, 2019) and ’Capital’ in the East (Springer, 2019). He has jointly authored the book Limits of Bargaining: Capital, Labour, and the State in Contemporary India (CUP, 2019).

Simantini Mukhopadhyay is an Assistant Professor of Economics at Institute of Development Studies Kolkata (IDSK), India. Her areas of interest include health economics, economics of poverty and inequality, and theoretical foundations of the capability approach. She has published her work in several international journals like BMJ Open, BMJ Global Health, Journal of Human Development and Capabilities, Journal of Biosocial Science, and Child Indicators Research, among others. She received the SPANDAN Grant supported by Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, 2020 for undertaking a short study. She visited University of Pavia in Italy as CICOPS Fellow for 12 weeks in 2022.