Measuring Poverty in a Growing World

Angus Deaton

Working Papers from eSocialSciences

Abstract: The extent to which growth reduces global poverty has been disputed for 30 years. A major problem is that consumption measured from household surveys, which is used to measure poverty, grows less rapidly than consumption measured in national accounts, in the world as a whole, and in large countries, particularly India, China, and the US. In consequence, measured poverty has fallen less rapidly than appears warranted by measured growth in poor countries. One plausible cause is that richer households are less likely to participate in surveys. But growth in the national accounts is also upwardly biased, and consumption in the national accounts contains large and rapidly growing items that are not consumed by the poor and not included in surveys.

Keywords: poverty; India; China; U.S; poor; consumption; inequality; consumption expenditure; survey issues; measurement of poverty; Angus Deaton; Population weighted growth rate; variance (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015-10
Note: Institutional Papers
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.esocialsciences.org/Articles/show_Artic ... ionalPapers&aid=7633

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ess:wpaper:id:7633

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from eSocialSciences
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Padma Prakash ().