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Modeling Regional Disparities for a Balanced Quality of life and Apportioning Public Funding – a Graph Theoretical Approach

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Abstract

Inclusive and equitable development is imperative in today’s society as persistence of regional disparities may create social discontentment. Public spending is largely responsible for equitable development in different regions under common governance. This study attempts to analyze the regional disparities by studying the data of an Indian state and model these in terms of district development digraph with a focus to highlight the methodology for apportioning development funds for minimizing regional imbalances. The nodes in the digraph represent the development variables and the edges represent the degree of influence among these. An equivalent matrix representation of the digraph is developed to define the district development function (DDF). Disparity Index (DI) is defined in terms of DDF and is used to apportion public spending to facilitate equitable growth.

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Notes

  1. District is an administrative sub-division of a state in India.

  2. Kumbh Mela: It is a religious festival of Hindus wherein they take dip in the holy river Ganges to wash away their sins – this coincides with the ingress of planet Jupiter in the Aquarius sign

  3. Pucca road is a local term derived from Hindi language and refers to roads that are designed to be solid and permanent. The term is applied for roads or houses in South Asia that are built using material such as stone, coal tar, brick, cement or concrete

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Acknowledgement

The author is thankful to officials in the various departments of the Government of Uttarakhand, India for providing data to carry out this work. The author gratefully acknowledges the motivation provided by Prof. Amitabh Kundu, JNU, New Delhi, India and Prof. V.K. Jain, Vice-Chancellor, Doon University, Dehradun, India to carry out this work.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Economics, School of Social Sciences, Doon University, Dehradun, Uttarakhand, 248001, India

    Shalini Gupta

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  1. Shalini Gupta
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Correspondence to Shalini Gupta.

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Gupta, S. Modeling Regional Disparities for a Balanced Quality of life and Apportioning Public Funding – a Graph Theoretical Approach. Applied Research Quality Life 10, 473–493 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11482-014-9327-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11482-014-9327-1

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