Description:
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 early 1990s. Growth has tended to
reduce poverty, including in the post-reform period. There
is no robust evidence that the responsiveness of poverty to
growth has increased, or decreased, since the reforms began,
although there are signs of rising inequality. The impact of
growth is higher for poverty measures that reflect
distribution below the poverty line, and it is higher using
growth rates calculated from household surveys than national
accounts. The urban-rural pattern of growth matters to the
pace of poverty reduction. However, in marked contrast to
the pre-reform period, the post-reform process of urban
economic growth has brought significant gains to the rural
poor as well as the urban poor.