Counting the World's Poor : Problems and Possible Solutions
As recent discussions have made clear, the apparent lack of poverty reduction in the face of historically high rates of economic growth-both in the world as a whole and in specific countries (most notably India)-provides fuel for the argument that...
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Language: | English en_US |
Published: |
Washington, DC: World Bank
2014
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Online Access: | http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/2001/01/17591986/counting-worlds-poor-problems-possible-solutions http://hdl.handle.net/10986/17125 |
Summary: | As recent discussions have made clear,
the apparent lack of poverty reduction in the face of
historically high rates of economic growth-both in the world
as a whole and in specific countries (most notably
India)-provides fuel for the argument that economic growth
does little to reduce poverty. How confident can we be that
the data actually support these inferences? At the
international level, the regular revision of purchasing
power parity exchange rates plays havoc with the poverty
estimates, changing them in ways that have little or nothing
to do with the actual experience of the poor. At the
domestic level, the problems in measuring poverty are
important not only for the world count but also for tracking
income poverty within individual countries. Yet, in many
countries, there are large and growing discrepancies between
the survey data-the source of poverty counts-and the
national accounts-the source of the measure of economic
growth. Thus economic growth, as measured, has at best a
weak relationship with poverty, as measured. |
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