Abstract
Despite an impressive growth record, India’s poverty performance over the last two decades leaves something to be desired. During the high growth period of 1990–2005, the headcount ratios at both $1.25 and $2 levels have been declining more slowly in India than the LDC average and even more slowly than Sub Saharan Africa (Lenagala and Ram 2010). The goal of this paper is to explore why this might be so.
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
w denotes wages, p denotes employment proportions and \({\text{W}}_{\text{t}} = \sum\nolimits_{i = 1}^{n} {p_{\tau i} w_{\tau i} } ,{\text{t}} = 0, 1\) Please see Eswaran et al. (2009; pp. 50–51) for more details on construction of these tables.
- 3.
We have changed the definition of skilled employment in the last figure (Fig. 6.7c) from middle school and above to graduate and above.
References
Eswaran M, Kotwal A, Ramaswami B, Wadhwa W (2009) Sectoral labour flows and agricultural wages in India, 1983–2004: has growth trickled down? Econom Polit Wkly 44(3):46–55
Kolli R, Hazra S (2005) Estimation of informal sector contribution in the net domestic product-Indian experience. Expert Group Informal Sector Stat, Delhi
Kotwal A, Ramaswami B, Wadhwa W (2011) Economic liberalization and Indian economic growth: what s the evidence? J Econ Lit 49(4):1152–1159
Lenagala C, Ram R (2010) Growth elasticity of poverty: estimates from new data. Int J Soc Econ 37(12):923–932
Acknowledgements
We thank Anil Deolalikar, Bharat Ramaswami, Wilima Wadhwa and the participants of the IGIDR Silver Jubilee conference for helpful comments.
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Kotwal, A., Chaudhuri, A.R. (2016). Why is Poverty Declining so Slowly in India?. In: Dev, S., Babu, P. (eds) Development in India. India Studies in Business and Economics. Springer, New Delhi. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-81-322-2541-6_6
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