The extent to which India's poor have benefited from the country’s economic growth has long been debated. This paper revisits the issues using a new series of consumption-based poverty measures spanning 50 years, and including a 15-year period after economic reforms began in earnest in the...

Alternative scenarios are considered for reducing by one billion the number of people living below $1.25 a day. The low-case, "pessimistic," path to that goal would see the developing world outside China returning to its slower pace of growth and poverty reduction of the 1980s and 1990s, though...