Economic Growth, Poverty, and Inequality in Indian States in the Pre-reform and Reform Periods

The paper assesses the impact of economic reforms on poverty incidence by decomposing the change in poverty ratio into growth/mean effect, inequality effect, and population shift effect for the rural and urban areas of 15 major states and at the all-India level. Using National Sample Surveys, data were analyzed for two time periods: (i) 1983 to 1993/4 and (ii) 1993/4 to 1999/2000, broadly representing the pre-reform and reform period, respectively. The growth/mean effect dominates in both periods over the inequality effect and the population shift effect. The growth effect, which is beneficial for poverty reduction, seems to have gone up in the reform period. The adverse inequality effect also fell during the reform period. States with a greater beneficial growth effect in the reform period also show a fall in the magnitude of an adverse population shift effect in the urban areas, i.e., a relatively smaller increase in the incidence of urban poverty caused by rural-urban migration.