Chronic Poverty in Rural India: issues and findings from panel data

The distinction between chronic or extended duration poverty and transient poverty is rarely made in the substantial literature on poverty in South Asia. This paper first reviews the limited panel data-based literature on chronic poverty in the region, and then uses panel data that longitudinally track around 3000 households to try and identify the factors that influenced or constrained changes in poverty status between 1970/1971 and 1981/ 1982. Data on consumption expenditure and estimates of the poverty line were used to classify households as poor or non-poor and then to divide them into four categories to capture mobility or immobility in the context of poverty. The categories are those households who were poor initially and remained poor over one decade, those who were non-poor and became poor, those who were poor initially and became non-poor, and those who remained non-poor in both surveys.