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...

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...

Longstanding development issues are revisited in the light of a newly-constructed data set of poverty measures for India spanning 60 years, including 20 years since reforms began in earnest in 1991. The study finds a downward trend in poverty measures since 1970, with an acceleration post-1991,...

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

December 1999 - Nonfarm economic growth in India had very different effects on poverty in different states. Nonfarm growth was least effective at reducing poverty in states where initial conditions were poor in terms of rural development and human resources. Among initial conditions conducive to...