Who Cares about Relative Deprivation

By M. Ravallion, Michael Lokshin. 2005

171 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Theories of relative deprivation predict negative welfare effects when friends and neighbors become better-off. Other theories point to likely positive benefits. The authors encompass both views within a single model, which motivates their tests using a survey for Malawi that collected data on satisfaction with life, own economic welfare, and the perceived welfare of friends and neighbors. Their methods help address likely biases in past tests found in the literature. In marked contrast to research for industrial countries, the authors find that relative deprivation is generally not a concern for most of their sample, although it does appear to matter to the comparatively well off. Their results provide a welfarist explanation for the priority given to absolute poverty in poor countries. The pattern of externalities also suggests that there will be too much poverty and inequality in this economy, even judged solely from the point of view of aggregate efficiency.

Subfields: Gender Studies, Social Psychology, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/726ead14a928d83a815b708cfaf67d0fc65cd0da

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Citations in the corpus

Community, Comparisons and Subjective Well-being in a Divided Society (2007, background): “10 A recent study, and the only other one to our knowledge, to find neighbors as positives is also for a poor African country, namely Malawi (Ravallion and Lokshin, 2005).”
Relative Deprivation (2012, background): “A neighbor’s increased resources can mean opportunities for work and protection against shared financial hardship and risk (Ravallion & Lokshin, 2010).”
Subjective Well-Being in China, 2005-2010: The Role of Relative Income, Gender and Location (2015, background): “Also see Kingdon and Knight (2007) for South Africa; Carlsson, Gupta, and Johansson-Stenman (2009) for India; Ravallion and Lokshin (2010) for Malawi; Asadullah and Chaudhury (2012) for Bangladesh; and Guillen-Royo (2011) for Peru.”
Subjective Welfare, Isolation, and Relative Consumption (2008, methodology): “Using data from Malawi, Ravallion & Lokshin (2005) show that subjective welfare falls with average neighborhood income, but only upper income households.1 From this they conclude that the poor care solely about absolute deprivation and hence that absolute poverty as a welfare measure is a justi ed p”
Poor, or Just Feeling Poor? On Using Subjective Data in Measuring Poverty (2012, methodology): “13 Figure 1: Nonparametric regressions of satisfaction with life against log consumption per person in Malawi, 2004 Source: Ravallion and Lokshin (2010).”
Weakly Relative Poverty (2009, unknown): “…Examples include van de Stadt, Kapteyn, and van de Geer (1985), Clark and Oswald (1996), Solnick and Hemenway (1998), Pradhan and Ravallion (2000), Ravallion and Lokshin (2002, 2010), McBride (2001), Blanchflower and Oswald (2004), Kingdon and Knight (2007), Ferrer-iCarbonell (2005), Luttmer…”
Will GDP Growth Increase Happiness in Developing Countries? (2011, background): “Ravallion and Lokshin (2010) appeal to large-scale 2004 household data from Malawi, which includes measures of satisfaction with life and consumption expenditure.”
Relative Deprivation (2014, background): “For example, poor villagers in Malawi interpreted a neighbor’s increased resources as an opportunity for work and protection against shared financial hardship and not as a source of RD (Ravallion & Lokshin, 2010).”