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School of Business and Management

School Research Seminar Series - Decomposing Poverty Change: Deciphering Total Change in Population and Beyond

5 February 2014

Time: 1:00 - 2:00pm
Venue: FB 1.15, 4th Floor Bancroft Building, Mile End Campus, E1 4NS

Speaker

Srijit Mishra, Visiting Fellow, ARC, LSE and Associate Professor, Indira Gandhi Institute of Development Research, India

Speaker Bio

Srijit Mishra researches and teaches on applied development economics. He is currently a Visiting Fellow at the LSE and is based at the Indira Gandhi Institute of Development Research (IGIDR), Mumbai. Some of his recent works are on farmers' suicides, a result of the larger agrarian crisis in India, and on a refinement of the Human Development Index.

Abstract

In the understanding of decomposing poverty change, the literature focus on the growth effect and that of changes in inequality. It misses the fact that growth effect can be subdued by an increase in population. In the literature on poverty decomposition this is further concealed by an implicit assumption that the growth effect can be captured by looking at the growth rate of mean income. To unravel this, as a first step the growth effect of mean income is replaced with the growth effect of total income and the impact of change in total population. These two along with changes in inequality form the three broader effects that can be computed in multiple ways depending upon the base period and the sequence of calculation. Changing the base does not alter the broader effects while specific attributions within each effect get interchanged. For a given base, there will be six possible sequences and we take an average of these to compute the three broad effects. Finally, poverty change on account of the three broad effects of growth of total income, change in inequality and change in total population are shown as part of the within-group effect while change in population shares, which is different from change in total population, is a between-group effect. We provide empirical illustrations with data from India.


Download Presentation [PDF 657KB]
*Research themes: Globalisation; Equality and Diversity; Ethics and Politics

*Chaired by Professor Sushanta Mallick

*Lunch from 12:30pm in the kitchen

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