Fig. 1: Estimates of rural inequality in the presence and absence of the decentralized forestry programme.

Each estimate represents the average predicted difference in the poverty index between households from a given ethnicity/caste category and Brahmin/Chhetri/Newar (BCN) households in the same ward on the basis of the results of a two-way fixed-effects model fitted on samples of households from population censuses in 2001 and 2011. Treated households are defined as those with forestry decentralization implemented in their ward by the year of the census, whereas control households are defined as those without (Methods). Positive values indicate that average poverty indices for households belonging to a given group are higher compared with poverty indices for Brahmin/Chhetri/Newar households in the same ward. N = 522,440 households included in model estimation. Robust 95% confidence intervals, corrected for clustering at the ward level. See Methods for details on the data and modelling approach.