Understanding divergence in India: a political economy approach

We construct a simple political economy model with imperfect capital markets to explain infrastructure investments across Indian states. The model predicts that: i) the fixed cost of accessing the modern sector, ii) the initial stock of infrastructure, iii) median voter wealth, and iv) corruption, can all potentially explain why different states have different levels of infrastructure investments. The theoretical model is motivated by recent empirical work on India that argues that the reason per‐capita income across Indian states has diverged is because of the distribution of infrastructure investments.