Xengkhuang 20.448 25.533 44 Vientanne province 31.108 33.728 18 Botknamxay 38.470 soate “7 Knammusne za74 28548 42 Savannakhet 24,501 25,569 09 Xaysomboon-SR : 21.002 Souther region 25,833 27,366 Lu Saravane 24.987 26.252 12 Sekong 18.804 24.089 54 Cchampacack 29,138 29,060 o7 Atapeu 23,120 23500 os Lae POR 25,404 20,506 28 Itis 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 uw