India's Stunning Progress Against Poverty
India has made remarkable progress against poverty in recent years. Explore the official statistics, deep dives from World Bank researchers, and the effect of Covid on poverty decline in India.
Noah Smith 🐇🇺🇦
Writes about economics, tweets about rabbits. For serious opinions/analysis, read my blog: https://t.co/KfUxUlCYPz
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This is just an incredible graph. India is making absolutely amazing strides against poverty.
— Noah Smith 🐇🇺🇦 (@Noahpinion) March 17, 2023
(ht @scienceisstrat1) pic.twitter.com/gq5AozJEMW -
Here is a more complete picture of how extreme poverty has gone down in India. Pretty amazing. pic.twitter.com/Ebg0EmakZY
— Noah Smith 🐇🇺🇦 (@Noahpinion) March 17, 2023 -
Some World Bank researchers recently did a deep dive into the Indian statistics, and concluded that official numbers overstated the poverty decline by a couple of percentage points. Everyone agrees that the decline has been dramatic.https://t.co/LOwqJXicSZ pic.twitter.com/jkR8bhQ1TE
— Noah Smith 🐇🇺🇦 (@Noahpinion) March 18, 2023 -
Of course, we must also take the effect of Covid into account. Gupta et al. (2021) do this, and find that poverty spiked briefly during lockdowns but then came back down.https://t.co/LjYF0cBJth pic.twitter.com/mdhLaX6n5R
— Noah Smith 🐇🇺🇦 (@Noahpinion) March 18, 2023 -
The World Bank's new numbers have 136 million Indians living below the $2.15 "extreme poverty" line (which is slightly higher than the $1.90 line used in some of the other graphs). That's down from 450 million in 2004 and 240 million in 2016.https://t.co/HEaZDaEoTz pic.twitter.com/LBORiECHF7
— Noah Smith 🐇🇺🇦 (@Noahpinion) March 18, 2023 -
In other words, though the exact numbers are affected by data quality, price measurements, Covid, and the chosen threshold, it's very clear that India has seen an absolutely massive, tremendous decrease in extreme poverty over the past two decades.
— Noah Smith 🐇🇺🇦 (@Noahpinion) March 18, 2023
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