Ideas for India: India’s poverty rate does not measure what you think it does

Like all national poverty rates, India’s poverty rate is interpreted as the share of the population that is poor in a given year. In this post written for Ideas for India, Joshua Merfeld and Jonathan Morduch argue that, in practice, India’s poverty rate is better thought of as the approximate fraction of the year that households experience poverty. They describe how this is rooted in the nature of data collection, and how it changes understandings of poverty and policy in the country.