This book is about India’s economic development since independence, but especially during the last two decades. A central concern of policy makers for over fifty years has been the alleviation of absolute poverty. Between 1950-1980, the economy barely grew at about 1 percent per capita per annum . Not surprisingly, poverty did not decline by much. In 1951-52, the first year of the National Sample Survey (NSS), the head-count ratio of poverty in India was deemed to be close to 45 percent of the population. Some thirty two years later, in 1983, the poverty ratio had stayed “constant” at 43 percent. However, since then, there has been a sharp fall in poverty with the level for 1999-2000 being “close” to 26 percent.
Determinants of growth, use of exchange rate, particularly Chinese exchange rate policy. Side products – explain acceleration in Indian growth in the eighties, the need for a new Plaza accord (a different yen, Chinese yuan).
This paper examines the data and methods used to estimate world inequality and world poverty since 1950. It was found that regardless of method used, world inequality reversed a more than a century old trend during the globalization period,loosely defined as the post 1980 years. Consumption growth of the poor also accelerated during globalization, and such growth was in excess of that of the average person. Poverty declined at close to 1.5 percentage points a year, a statistic not affected much by use of different PPP data, or use of different methods, including the method adopted by the official “keeper” of world poverty statistics, the World Bank. Indeed, a striking result obtained is that world poverty, according to the World Bank method, data, and definitions, was close to 15 percent in 2002, a level that is meant to be the millennium development goal target for 2015. (JEL O15, O20, O47,O5)
Poverty is best defined with reference to the best definition available on obscenity: “I know it when I see it” was the cryptic definition of a US Supreme Court justice adjudicating in an obscenity case in the mid-seventies.There is a rich history of formal definitions of poverty, going back to the mid-nineteenth century. It is an attempt to capture the bottom-half of the population, the have-nots, the poor.
The study of inequality and poverty is politically correct, morally superior, at the cutting edge of power derived from policy prescriptions, and in a world dominated by the public sector (governments, and government organizations (GOs), quasi government organizations (QGOs) and non-government organizations (NGOs)) it is Big Business. Which is why there has been the largest amount of ideology in the study of the subject – at least since Karl Marx documented that ideology is king.
