Data and Dogma : The Great Indian Poverty Debate

Deaton, Angus ; Kozel, Valerie

Oxford University Press on behalf of the World Bank

关键词: ACCOUNTING;    AGRICULTURAL LABORERS;    AGRICULTURAL WAGES;    AGRICULTURAL YIELDS;    ANNUAL GROWTH;   

DOI  :  10.1093/wbro/lki009
RP-ID  :  76750

学科分类：社会科学、人文和艺术（综合）

来源: World Bank Open Knowledge Repository

【 摘 要 】

What happened to poverty in India in the1990s has been fiercely debated, both politically andstatistically. The debate has run parallel to the widerdebate about globalization and poverty in the 1990s and isalso an important part of that debate. The economic reformsof the early 1990s in India were followed by rates ofeconomic growth that were high by historical standards. Theeffects on poverty remain controversial, however. Theofficial numbers published by the government of India,showing acceleration in the rate of poverty reduction from36 percent of the population in 1993 to 1994 to 26 percentin 1999 to 2000, have been challenged for showing both toolittle and too much poverty reduction. The various claimshave often been frankly political, but there are also manyimportant statistical issues. The debate, reviewed in thisarticle, provides an excellent example of how politics andstatistics interact in an important, largely domesticdebate. Although there is no consensus on what happened topoverty in India in the 1990s, there is good evidence boththat poverty fell and that the official estimates of povertyreduction are too optimistic, particularly for rural India.The issues covered in this article, although concerned withthe measurement of poverty in India, have wide internationalrelevance discrepancies between surveys and nationalaccounts, the effects of questionnaire design, reportingperiods, survey nonresponse, repair of imperfect data,choice of poverty lines, and interplay between statisticsand politics.