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What Do We Know about Poverty in India in 2017/18?

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Date
2022-02
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Published
2022-02
Author(s)
Edochie, Ifeanyi Nzegwu
Moreno Herrera, Laura
Newhouse, David Locke
Sinha Roy, Sutirtha
Yonzan, Nishant
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Abstract
This paper nowcasts poverty in India, one of the countries with the largest population below the international poverty line of $1.90 per person per day. Because the latest official household survey dates back to 2011/12, there is considerable uncertainty about recent poverty trends in the country. Applying a pass-through and survey-to-survey methodology, extreme poverty (at the $1.90 poverty line) for India in 2017 is estimated at 10.4 percent with a confidence interval of [8.1, 11.3]. The urban and rural poverty rates are estimated at 7.2 and 12.0 percent, respectively. Across a wide range of publicly available data sources, the paper finds no evidence of an increase in poverty between 2011/12 and 2017/18.
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Edochie, Ifeanyi Nzegwu; Freije-Rodriguez, Samuel; Lakner, Christoph; Moreno Herrera, Laura; Newhouse, David Locke; Sinha Roy, Sutirtha; Yonzan, Nishant. 2022. What Do We Know about Poverty in India in 2017/18?. Policy Research Working Paper;No. 9931. © World Bank. http://hdl.handle.net/10986/36971 License: CC BY 3.0 IGO.
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