Revisiting the Kuznets Curve: Development and Inequality in Nang Rong, Thailand

Jeffrey Edmeades, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Varachai Thongthai, Mahidol University

In this paper, we use information on household asset ownership to examine patterns of inequality over a sixteen-year period in Nang Rong, a relatively poor agrarian district in Northeastern Thailand in the midst of the development process. Drawing on theories predicting increases in inequality at early stages of development, particularly Kuznets’ ‘inverted-U’ shaped relationship between income inequality and economic development, we hypothesize that inequality has increased over this period, partly due to shifts in demographic behavior in the region, particularly migration. Using information on household asset ownership in 1984, 1994, and 2000, we create an index of household wealth that allows us to investigate this hypothesis at the village and district level using a variety of measures of inequality (the Gini coefficient, the Thiel index, and the coefficient of variation). We finally explore some of the determinants of household shifts in relative status over the period studied.