Regional Disparity Essay

1. Introduction
Economic Development of a country or a region1 is the favourable transformation of the economy that leads to higher income of the people resulting into improved well-being and economic capabilities of its inhabitants. In a broader sense, economic development means not only increase in per capita income or improvement in well-being but also the removal of poverty and malnutrition; an increase in life expectancy; access to improved sanitation facility, clean drinking water, health and education services; reduction of infant mortality; and increased access to knowledge and schooling, and literacy in particular (Ray 1998). Development is more concerned with equity and favourable distribution of economic proceeds than growth which

The measurement of regional disparity and inequality may help understanding the sources of poverty and backwardness region wise. Theoretically, inequality indexes (such as Gini Index) provide an appropriate measure of regional disparities (Shankar and Shah 2003). Poverty rate and deprivation rate also matter of concerned for measuring regional disparities. Therefore, the purpose of the present study is to assess the relative position of the TTAADC2 (Tripura Tribal Areas Autonomous District Council) and Non-TTAADC areas in the state of Tripura in terms of income inequality and also in terms of both income and non-income dimensions of

But, following Atkinson (1970) and Sen (1973, 1976, 1997) an expedient departure has been noticed in the measurement of poverty and inequality from uni-dimensional to multidimensional approaches. The multidimensional approach may be marked as the intersection approach i.e. poor in two or more dimension (Gordon et al. 2003) or relative approach (Wagle 2007) in fixing the poverty line. On the theoretical front, the dimension of education, health and income are often measured and few studies have included subjective wellbeing such as fear to face hardship (Calvo 2008) in defining multidimensional poverty. Studies also document varying degrees of correlation between dimensions of poverty or deprivation (Klasen 2000). In case of poverty measurement, there is almost always a degree of arbitrariness about the poverty line. Multidimensional poverty measurement is an improvement over the uni-dimensional measurement to remove the arbitrariness (Ravallion 2011). Bourguignon and Chakravarty (2003) take as their fundamental starting point in the development of multidimensional poverty measures that poverty consists of a shortfall from a threshold on each dimension of an individual’s well-being. The MPI can be used as an analytical tool to identify the most vulnerable group or people, show aspects in which they are deprived and help to reveal the