Microdeterminants of consumption, poverty, growth, and inequality in Bangladesh

Abstract

Using in a consistent way the household level data of five successive national surveys, this paper analyses at once the microdeterminants (and changes thereof) of consumption, poverty, growth, and inequality in Bangladesh from 1983 to 1996. Education, demographics, land ownership, occupation, and geographic location all affect consumption and poverty. The gains in per capita consumption associated with many of these household characteristics tend to be stable over time. Demographics have had the largest impact on growth. Education (in urban areas) and land (in rural areas) contribute the most to measures of conditional between group inequality, a new concept introduced in the paper to avoid the pitfalls of traditional group decompositions of the Gini index, followed by location in both sectors.