How we think about development hinges in large part on how we think about poverty. The world community has embraced the goal to end global extreme poverty as a cornerstone of development policy, but we show how success will hinge on how “poverty” is understood. We argue that global poverty will not be eliminated even if the global headcount of poverty is brought to zero. This is because much poverty is experienced within the year by people who are not typically designated as “poor”. Their deprivations may be substantial, but they systematically go uncounted through the process of annualizing data. We consider poverty as experienced during the year and describe the steps needed to truly achieve the goal of ending poverty.
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Viewing all posts with tag: 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, Merfeld and 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. This article was written for the publication Ideas for India.