Challenging Inequalities: An indo-European perspective

Challenging inequality by social provisions and new institutions have played an essential role in shaping the different development paths both in India and in Europe. Liberty, civil rights, and political competition have been and can still be instrumental to improve health, schooling, material wellbeing and justice for all. Our project explored such features in the Indian context, in a comparative perspective. We focused on child mortality, female employment and autonomy, domestic violence, girls’ education, and the distribution of household incomes relative to individual incomes. Over the last three decades, child survival has improved worldwide. Yet, the survival rates vary across and within countries and many children still die from preventable diseases and injuries. A clear case is the variations within India. To show why and how unnecessary child mortality varies across Indian constituencies, we explored the role of economic inequality. We show how inequality can harm social provisions for the poor, and how political competition in contrast can mitigate this effect. We find a clear pattern. Higher inequality kills. Inequality causes more infant deaths, but only when there is weak political competition at the local level. Parts of the mechanism concern the provision and funding of public health care. For instance, in constituencies with low political competition and high inequality, authorities disfavor health centers, which in turn increase child mortality, while constituencies with high political competition fare much better and reduce child mortality. The NREGA workfare program in India guarantees all rural households 100 days of paid work each year at the minimum pay. We investigated how the program affects female’s political participation and domestic violence. NREGA explicitly encourages female participation, and females employ nearly half of the total workdays in the program. We linked detailed data on NREGA employment with data on voter turnout from 50,000 polling stations in the largest state of India, Uttar Pradesh. We find that increases in the number of jobs provided leads to higher female turnout in Indian elections. We also show that the effect seems to be driven by a network effect, in that NREGA brings together women with shared interests, which is likely to foster discussions on politics and other issues. In patriarchal settings where women otherwise have limited mobility and few social ties, such networks may be difficult to find. Are there also some negative side effects on the abuse of power between husband and wife? Based on detailed administrative data, we show that the work program unfortunately leads to an increase, rather than a decline, in violence against women. We argue that the effect could be explained by “male backlash” as husbands exercise violence to regain power within marriage. Unfortunately, being a girl is a severe hindrance to education in rural India. Traditional patriarchal values prescribe that the son will take care of his parents, while the daughter will marry and leave the house. Many households consider education to a daughter a waste of family resources and a break with the values of traditional conservatism. Social policies can change this discrimination. The well-known bicycle program in the state of Bihar is an attempt to get more girls into school. Initiated in 2006, the program gives every girl enrolled in class nine a cash amount to buy a bicycle and by that easy access to school. In one of our research articles, we evaluated the long-term impacts of the program. We find that the bicycling program raised the probability of completing 9th grade by as much as 22 percentage points, which corresponds to an increase of about 60 percent compare to the baseline level. We also explored broader social changes. We show that girls delay their marriage due to the program, and that there is a reduction in child marriage. We also find a strong empowerment effect on the mothers of girls in the right age to benefit from the program. In particular, the mothers obtain a greater saying in intra-household decision making, All over the world, the formation of couples reduces income inequality, we claim in contrast to the emphasis of inequality in assortative mating. The reduction in inequality, the leveling, is the result of two counteracting effects: a pooling effect, capturing the potential sharing of two individual incomes; and a sorting effect, capturing the tendency that people marry within their own income group (assortative mating). We explore pooling and sorting in the distribution of couples' incomes in 47 countries, including India and most European countries. We find a clear pattern. The pooling effect dominates the sorting effect by a factor of seven to one. The formation of couples thus reduces inequality overall.

The main goal of the research project was to push the research frontiers of the study on inequality in Economics and Social Sciences. We believe we have succeeded, but that is of course subjective. Measured more objectively in terms of publications in top academic journals, the project has excelled. For instance, the project has led to six scientific publications: one in a top-three journal in Political Science (the Journal of Politics), and five in well-respected journals in Economics and Development Studies (including The Scandinavian Journal of Economics, Journal of Applied Econometrics, Journal of Development Studies and Economic Development and Cultural Change). Several of our research papers have made methodological contributions to the current academic literature, for instance the article by Bhattacharya, Kjelsrud and Somanathan (2021) on the distribution effects of public services, and the article by Aaberge, Havnes and Mogstad (2020) on the measurement of income distributions. All of the other articles in the research project have clear and well-defined policy implications. For instance, our research on the bicycle program in Bihar shows how a cheap and simple intervention can improve female school enrollment substantially, and even empower women more generally. Our research on the Indian workfare program NREGA highlights potential side effects of such programs, both positive (increased political awareness) and negative (increased domestic violence). Hopefully, these results will help governments and organizations, in India and elsewhere, when implementing similar type of programs.

Disparity of human condition continues to be one of the major challenges in both developed and developing countries – in both Europe and India. The project combines research on the foundations and applications of new methods of assessing inequality and its causes and consequences. One important concern is how to design of public policies that can mitigate the most adverse consequences. Below we list six examples of questions addressed. Our research consortium gathers together top scholars from various disciplines of the social sciences and major institutions in Europe and India. The leader of the project, as well as all its French participants, belong to the Centre de Sciences Humaines (CSH). This center is part of a larger multidisciplinary French research unit (jointly managed by the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the French Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique) located in both Delhi and Pondicherry. This double location in India makes the center particularly well-suited for organizing the consortium and easing the circulation and meeting of participating scholars from both India and Europe. The research proposal will not cover all aspects of inequalities just outlined. Rather, it will examine specific challenges raised by these inequalities for both India and Europe. The main expected contributions of the project are as follows. - Defining and measuring inequalities: The research conducted under this general heading deals with the issue of appraising inequalities. The first part of this section is concerned with the theoretical development of new tools and criteria for this purpose. The other parts apply these tools or others to the appraisal of specific inequalities that concern India and Europe. - Inequality reducing policies: This part of the project examines three important policies put in place in India to reduce some adverse consequences of inequality.