The Unassuming Economist

From a paper by Maitreesh Ghatak, and Rishabh Kumar:

“This paper addresses the lack of official data on Indian poverty between 2011-12 and 2022-23, a
period known as the “missing decade”. It critiques two major attempts to estimate poverty during
this time: one using national account growth rates and the other using a private survey. These
methods are criticised for their assumptions and data limitations. The paper proposes a new
method, imputing consumption from official labour force surveys using a wage-based model. The
authors find that poverty reduction was not as dramatic as previously suggested, with about 20%
of Indians living in poverty on the eve of the pandemic. The paper’s analysis aligns with the fact
that India’s structural economic transformation was limited, with agriculture output stagnant and
regional convergence lacking. The paper concludes that while poverty may have gone down, but
its rate of decline has been slow in the decade after 2011-12.”