Obtaining consistent estimates on poverty over time as well as monitoring poverty trends on a timely basis is a priority concern for policy makers. However, these objectives are not readily achieved in practice when household consumption data are neither frequently collected, nor constructed...

This paper analyzes the Indian National Sample Survey data spanning 1987/88-2011/12 to uncover patterns of transition into and out of different classes of the consumption distribution. At the aggregate level, income growth has accelerated, accompanied by accelerating poverty decline. Underlying...

Recent National Sample Surveys point to significant poverty reduction in India since 2004/05, with a marked acceleration between 2009/10 and 2011/12. This paper enquires into important aspects of income mobility between 2004/05 and 2011/12, based on new statistical methods to convert the three...

Little research currently exists on a vulnerability line that distinguishes the poor population from the population that is not poor but that still faces significant risk of falling back into poverty. This paper attempts to fill this gap by proposing vulnerability lines that can be...

The authors examine the performance of small area welfare estimation. The method combines census and survey data to produce spatially disaggregated poverty and inequality estimates. To test the method, they compare predicted welfare indicators for a set of target populations with their true...

This paper provides evidence consistent with elite capture of Social Fund investment projects in Ecuador. Exploiting a unique combination of data-sets on village-level income distributions, Social Fund project administration, and province level electoral results, the authors test a simple model...

This paper proposes a new measure of growth in shared prosperity, based on shifts in population shares of different income groups over time. This measure complements the definition of shared prosperity recently proposed by the World Bank in which income growth of the bottom 40 percent is...

Poverty estimates based on cross-section data provide static snapshots of poverty rates. Although a time series of cross-section data can offer some insights into poverty trends, it does not allow for an assessment of dynamics at the household level. Such a dynamic perspective on poverty...

Panel data conventionally underpin the analysis of poverty mobility over time. However, such data are not readily available for most developing countries. Far more common are the "snap-shots" of welfare captured by cross-section surveys. This paper proposes a method to construct synthetic panel...

This paper assembles data at the all-India level and for the village of Palanpur, Uttar Pradesh, to document the growing importance, and influence, of the non-farm sector in the rural economy between the early 1980s and late 2000s. The suggestion from the combined National Sample Survey and...