Title: The “State” of Persons with Disabilities in India
Abstract: AbstractAbstractAmong countries with comparable levels of income, India has one of the more progressive disability policy frameworks. However, people with disabilities in India are still subject to multiple disadvantages. This paper focuses on state-level variations in outcomes for people with disabilities to provide an explanation for the contrast between the liberal laws on paper and the challenges faced by people with disabilities in practice. Using average monthly per-capita expenditure as an indicator of economic well-being, instrumental-variable Wald estimator results indicate that households with members with disabilities have expenditures that are 14% lower compared with households with able members. This effect is most pronounced among families with male adults and children with disabilities, and in states that are relatively poor, relatively more urban, those that experience extremes in annual rainfall and temperature, and those that have low to medium levels of inequality.Keywords: DisabilityIndiaMonthly expenditureState variationsPovertyInequalityJEL codes:: O12I15I18 AcknowledgementsThanks to Sarita Bhalotra, Alka Bhargava, Jeanine Braithwaite, Deon Filmer, Marty Krauss, P. S. Meena, Philip O'Keefe and Aleksandra Posarac for helpful suggestions and comments. We thank two anonymous referees whose comments have greatly improved the paper. N. Menon is grateful for a faculty research grant from Brandeis University. The usual disclaimer applies.About the AuthorNidhiya Menon is Associate Professor of Economics at Brandeis University, Waltham, MA, USA. Her research interests are development economics, health, labor and gender issues. She has worked in several areas including microfinance, occupational diversification, child health and women's labor choices in countries of South Asia, East Asia and Africa. She teaches classes in statistics, development economics and international economics. She holds a PhD from Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island, USA.Susan L. Parish is Nancy Lurie Marks Professor of Disability Policy at Brandeis University, Waltham, MA, USA. Her research examines the health and financial well-being of children and adults with disabilities, as well as their caregiving families. She is particularly interested in the health of women with disabilities and the impact of poverty policies on people with disabilities. She teaches classes in disability policy that emphasizes both qualitative and quantitative methods. She holds a PhD from the University of Illinois, Chicago, IL, USA.Roderick A. Rose is Research Associate and Project Director at the Carolina Institute for Public Policy at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC, USA. He has a background in economics and is versatile with advanced econometric methods. He specializes in research methods for intervention and human services evaluation, with interest in missing data imputation and hierarchical linear modeling. He holds an MSc in Economics from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Publication Year: 2014
Publication Date: 2014-09-26
Language: en
Type: article
Indexed In: ['crossref']
Access and Citation
Cited By Count: 7
AI Researcher Chatbot
Get quick answers to your questions about the article from our AI researcher chatbot