Low incomes are often unsteady within the year. By design, however, poverty headcounts in national statistics downplay the challenges of instability. We introduce the timecount, a measure that explicitly captures the shifting durations and intensities of poverty within the year. We show that, due to survey methodologies, timecounts have unintentionally become the de facto poverty rates in India and other countries, effectively replacing headcounts. In monthly longitudinal data from rural India, the timecount is 28% larger than the conventional headcount, captures deprivations of a wider population, and better predicts child health. We describe consequences for analysis, global policy, and ethics.
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Viewing all posts with tag: poverty measurement
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.