Assessment of the welfare impacts of low-frequency events, such as macroeconomic crises and stabilizations, are often confounded by sampling and nonsampling errors that generate fluctuations in household survey-based welfare indicators; they are also limited by our ability to explain...

Rural poverty rankings of Indian states in 1990 were very different from 1960. This unevenness in progress allows us to study the causes of poverty in a developing rural economy. We model the evolution of various poverty measures, using pooled state-level data for the period 1957-91. Differences...

We assess the developing world's progress in reducing poverty during the late 1980s using new data on the distribution of household consumption or income per person for 44 countries. Local currencies are adjusted to purchasing power parity. To assess robustness, restricted dominance tests are...

The authors estimate that in 1985 about one in five persons in the developing world lived in poverty, judged by the standards of the poorest countries. This rises to one in three at a common, more generous, poverty line. The aggregate consumption short-fall of the poorest fifth is about one half...

The unevenness of the rise in rural living standards in the various states of India since the 1950s allowed the authors to study the causes of poverty. They modeled the evolution of average consumption and various poverty measures using pooled state-level data for 1957-91. They found that...

Armed with new data, we return to an old question from the pages of this journal: to what extent do India's rural poor share in agricultural growth? Combining data from 24 household sample surveys spanning 35 years with other sources, we estimate a model of the joint determination of...

An econometric model of poverty incidence is calibrated to 20 household surveys for India's 15 major states spanning 1960-1994. The model builds on past research suggesting that the key determinants of the rate of poverty reduction at state level are agricultural yields, growth of the non-farm...

Looking back 40 years or so, progress against poverty in India has been highly uneven over time and space. It took 20 years for the national poverty rate to fall below - and stay below - its value in the early 1950s. And trend rates of poverty reduction have differed appreciably between states....