The extent to which India's poor have benefited from the country’s economic growth has long been debated. This paper revisits the issues using a new series of consumption-based poverty measures spanning 50 years, and including a 15-year period after economic reforms began in earnest in the...

How much can India reduce poverty nationwide by manipulating the distribution of income between regions or sectors? What is the overall effect on the poor of targeting resources toward the poorer states of India - or toward the generally poorer rural sector. Given real constraints on policy...

There has been much debate about how much India's poor have shared in the economic growth unleashed by economic reforms in the 1990s. The authors argue that India has probably maintained its 1980s rate of poverty reduction in the 1990s. However, there is considerable diversity in performance...

Unlike most developing countries, consistent poverty measures for India can be tracked over a long time. The authors used 20 household surveys for rural India for the years 1958-90 to measure the effects of agricultural growth on rural poverty and on the rural labor market and to find out how...

Views differ on how much India's poor have shared in the growth and contraction in the country's average standard of living since independence. Some have argued that the rural growth that accompanied the green revolution in the 1970s and 1980s brought few gains to the poor in the rural sector,...

The authors characterize poverty in Sri Lanka, using data from two recent household surveys (for 1985-86 and1990-91). Poverty rates in 1990-91 were highest in the rural sector and lowest in the estate sector, with the urban sector in between. Between 1985-86 and 1990-91, national poverty...

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...

The authors assess the developing world's progress in reducing absolute-consumption poverty during 1981-91, using new data on the distribution of household consumption or income per capita for 40 countries (at two points in time for 18 of the countries). They apply dominance tests to the...

In counting the poor, and measuring the severity of absolute poverty, one faces a number of difficult questions. What poverty line should be used? Should one use the same poverty line across all countries? How should one adjust for differences across countries in the purchasing power of their...

The authors use 20 household surveys for India's 15 major states, spanning 1960-94, to study how initial conditions and the sectoral composition of economic growth interact to influence how much economic growth reduced poverty. The elasticities of measured poverty to farm yields and development...