Xiengkhuang: E 20,449 25,533 44 Vientianne province 31,108 33,729 16 Borikhamxay “36,470 30,412 a7 Krammuane 22978 28,349 42 ‘Savannakhet 24,501 25,569 09 Xaysomboom-SR . 21,002 ‘Southern region 25933 27,368 14 Saravane 24,867 28,252 12 ‘Sekong 18,664 24,089 BA (Champasack 28,198 29,069 o7 Attapeu 23,129 23.549 04 Lao PDR 25,494 28,886 28 It is also evident from Table 5 that growth rates of per capita real consumption are not uniform across the provinces. Two provinces, namely, Oudomxay and Borikhamxay, have highly negative growth rates of 5.3 and 4.7 percent, respectively. These results clearly suggest that with high economic growth at the national level, some regions can still face a significant drop in the real standard of living. Thus, a key policy goal of the government should be to achieve more broad-based economic growth. 5. Inequality in Lao PDR In this study, we measure the degree of inequality by the Gini index, which is the most widely used measure of inequality. Since the Gini index is a uni-dimensional measure of inequality that does not fully reveal changes in the income distribution, we supplement the Gini index by quintile shares. ‘The degree of inequality was first measured for per capita nominal consumption. The empirical results are presented in Table 6. Compared to many other Asian countries, inequality in Lao PDR is not high. The bottom 20 percent of the population had a share in total consumption of 8.5 percent in 1992-3, while that for the richest 20 percent the consumption share was 42 percent. However, the consumption share of the bottom 20 percent population declined to 7.4 percent in 1997-98, while that of the top 20 percent increased to 45.3 percent. The Gini rT