Working Paper
A new inequality estimate for urban India?

This paper applies a novel inequality estimation method to household consumption expenditure in Mumbai, India.

Since the richest households may be missing in survey data, this re-estimated inequality figure takes them into account by combining survey data with house price data. However, application of this method does not indicate that the survey-based Gini coefficient of 0.447 underestimates consumption inequality in Mumbai; none of the ten investigated scenarios yields a higher estimate.

Further analyses are necessary to assess the robustness of estimates and the usefulness of applying this method to the whole of urban India.