Affiliation:
1. Indian Institute of Technology Delhi
2. University of Massachusetts Boston
Abstract
AbstractThis paper provides new and improved estimates of wealth concentration in India during 2012–2018. Official surveys show a decline in wealth inequality and mean wealth per adult for the first time in three decades. We argue that although these wealth surveys are meant to be nationally representative, they underestimate the upper tail of the Indian wealth distribution—top wealth levels appear orders of magnitudes below externally measured estimates and unrepresentative of increasing stock‐market participation over this period. By combining official surveys and rich lists, we provide new estimates of top wealth shares and total personal wealth in India. We find that personal wealth is underestimated by nearly 54 percent in official data, and this gap increased sharply during the 2010s. Our revised estimates show wealth concentration to have sharply increased during 2012–2018. The share of India's top 1 percent is higher than similar estimates for Asia, and second only to Russia.
Subject
Economics and Econometrics
Reference33 articles.
1. Recent trends in wealth inequality in India;Anand I.;Economic & Political Weekly,2016
2. Atkinson A. B.(2006).Concentration among the rich. Number 2006/151. WIDER Research Paper.
3. Looking for the missing rich: Tracing the top tail of the wealth distribution;Bach S.;International Tax & Public Finance,2019
4. Bharti N. K.(2018).Wealth inequality class & caste in India 1961–2012.WID. World Working Paper 14.