Data and Dogma : The Great Indian Poverty Debate

By Angus Deaton, V. Kozel. 2005

369 citations recorded by the source corpus.

What happened to poverty in India in the 1990s has been fiercely debated, both politically and statistically. The debate has run parallel to the wider debate about globalization and poverty in the 1990s and is also an important part of that debate. The economic reforms of the early 1990s in India were followed by rates of economic growth that were high by historical standards. The effects on poverty remain controversial, however. The official numbers published by the government of India, showing acceleration in the rate of poverty reduction from 36 percent of the population in 1993 to 1994 to 26 percent in 1999 to 2000, have been challenged for showing both too little and too much poverty reduction. The various claims have often been frankly political, but there are also many important statistical issues. The debate, reviewed in this article, provides an excellent example of how politics and statistics interact in an important, largely domestic debate. Although there is no consensus on what happened to poverty in India in the 1990s, there is good evidence both that poverty fell and that the official estimates of poverty reduction are too optimistic, particularly for rural India. The issues covered in this article, although concerned with the measurement of poverty in India, have wide international relevance discrepancies between surveys and national accounts, the effects of questionnaire design, reporting periods, survey nonresponse, repair of imperfect data, choice of poverty lines, and interplay between statistics and politics.

Subfields: Sociology and Political Science, Soil Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/b53b099554addf4c87374d922ceb4d19f0f03662

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Citations in the corpus

A global count of the extreme poor in 2012: data issues, methodology and initial results (2015, neutral): “An initial proposal from Dykstra et al. (2014) was to update the line based on US inflation rate.”
Calculating Comparable Statistics From Incomparable Surveys, With an Application to Poverty in India (2004, background): “(For a survey of the whole debate on the Indian poverty numbers the interested reader is referred to Deaton and Kozel 2005.)”
For India's Rural Poor, Growing Towns Matter More than Growing Cities (2017, background): “There is debate about the consumption and poverty estimates from the 55th Round (1999/00) that is described in detail by Deaton and Kozel (2005).”
Microfinance and household poverty reduction:: New evidence from India (2010, background): “The poverty head count ratio has been much higher in rural areas than in urban areas (e.g. Deaton and Kozel 2005 and Sen and Himanshu 2004). reducing poverty.”
Growth Still Is Good for the Poor (2013, neutral): “A large literature has discussed substantial differences between growth in survey mean income and corresponding aggregates in the national accounts in some countries (see for example Deaton (2005) and Deaton and Kozel (2005) for the case of India in particular).”
Indian Income Inequality, 1922‐2015: From British Raj to Billionaire Raj? (2019, background): “, 2011) and on the impacts on poverty, with a substantial reduction in poverty rates4 (Deaton and Dreze, 2002; Deaton and Kozel, 2005; World Bank, 2017).”
Semiparametric efficiency in GMM models with auxiliary data (2007, neutral): “Changes in the questionnaire likely led to the overestimation of food consumption, and hence to the underestimation of poverty [Deaton and Kozel (2005), Tarozzi (2007)].”
Model projections for household energy use in India (2011, background): “The differences in income-numbers led to a debate among poverty economists on which method is more reliable (see Deaton, 2001; Deaton and Kozel, 2005; Ravallion, 2001; Srinivasan, 2001; Sundaram and Tendulkar, 2003).”