Quality of Governance, Corruption and Absolute Child Poverty in India

Mundle, Chakraborty, Chowdhury and Sikdar (2012) developed the first quality of governance (QoG) measures to assess the performance of India’s states. The present article builds on Mundle et al.’s (2012) framework by analyzing the relationship between their QoG measures and absolute child poverty in India. The empirical analysis also includes corruption indicators from Transparency International to test the relative importance of corruption and governance for combating child poverty. I combine macro (states) and micro data (children) with multilevel statistical models to achieve this task. A key finding is that governance has more explanatory power than corruption. Further, among Mundle et al.’s six measures, the BORDA measure performs consistently better and explains about 60 per cent of the between-states variation: one unit improvement in BORDA yields about 1 per cent decrease in absolute child poverty. The sensitivity of this inference is tested with regards to severe education, shelter and food deprivation.