We consider a situation where the relatively ‘poor’ are concerned about their relative income status with respect to a relevant reference group. Such a concern is explicitly introduced in a utility function to study the consumption and saving behavior of the poor in terms of a static and...

India is a witness of regional disparities in many sphere of socio- economic development. On one side, world’s majority of new billionaires are in India and on the another side, India has majority of poor people. Like that, in development, the States like Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Punjab, and Gujrat...

The existing literature on poverty has discussed about the conflict between income-based measure and nutrition-based measure. However, the role of social inequality in influencing individual’s consumption and inducing greater consumption of the so called status good has been relatively...

The conflict between the income based and nutrition based estimates of poverty is a widely debated issue in economic literature. This paper, using a two commodity framework, attempts to show that in presence of inequality, a status driven utility function can reconcile the conflict between the...

In presence of inequality a status driven utility function reconciles the conflict between income based and nutrition based measures of poverty. Moreover, it can explain why the poor tend to save less, an established empirical fact in the developing countries. The result is independent of the...

Poverty is multidimensional in nature. Poverty is associated not only with insufficient income or consumption but also with insufficient outcomes with respect to health, nutrition, and literacy and deficient social relations, insecurity, and low self-esteem and powerlessness. Since poverty is a...

When ever the Planning Commission of India releases the poverty data, that data is being criticised by experts and economists. The main criticism is underestimation of poverty especially in rural India by the Planning Commission. This paper focuses on that criticism and compares the Indian...