Poverty Has Declined in the 1990s

These focus on possible interference between alternative reference periods used to elicit expenditure data from sampled households. This paper resolves these concerns, using comparable consumer expenditure data from the employment-unemployment survey (EUS) of the 55th round, as well as data from four experimental rounds of the CES, conducted between the quinquennial larger scale 50th and 55th rounds. It shows that the size distributions of consumer expenditure from the 55th round CES are comparable to ones from the 50th round – subject to appropriate recalculation – and that there is accordingly unambiguous evidence that poverty in India declined in the 1990s, in all dimensions. Indeed, the average annual rate of reduction in the last six years of the 1990s is shown to have been higher than that between 1982 and 1993.