Pro poor growth : a partial ordering approach

The paper examines the partial pro poor orderings for different growth curves and sets of Equally Distributed Equivalent growth rate dominance. A new pro poor growth curve as the of change of Gini social welfare function, based on the quantiles of logarithmic income, has been proposed. It has been established that the newly proposed growth curve including its relative version i.e its deviation from the growth rate of mean, is robust to other growth curves that has been proposed in the literature, in terms of conclusiveness. Empirical illustrations are provided using Monthly per capita expenditure data, for different states of India, officially collected by National Sample Survey Office. It has been observed that the absolute and relative versions provides conclusive result in many cases where other pro poor growth curves fails to do so. Growth in rural and urban India is pro poor in an absolute sense, since from the early 1990s. Although, relative pro poor growth has been achieved for some spells in rural India, but, in Urban India, it is in general biased to the non-poor in most of the spells.