India. Craig Jeffrey

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СКАЧАТЬ for the 60 years from 1957 to 2012 (Datt et al. 2016a, 2016b). Their analysis refers to the definition of the poverty line established by the Planning Commission in the 1970s (the one anchored in the nutritional norms of 2,400/2,100 calories per person per day), updated in the conventional way, using urban and rural price indices. They find that there has been a definite downward trend in poverty since the early 1970s, according to the standard measures, with acceleration after 1991 – when India embarked upon the economic reforms described in chapter 2 – despite increasing inequality. Poverty reduction since 1991 has been more responsive to growth than it was before – there has been a higher growth elasticity of poverty incidence reduction. Still, as Ravallion has shown elsewhere, the growth elasticity of poverty in China, historically, has been about twice that of India, probably because of more favourable initial conditions. With relatively low inequality in access to land and human capital, the poor in China have gained more from growth (though over time these favourable conditions have been eroded with increasing inequality in incomes and in education and health), while opportunities for the poor in India have been restricted by low levels of education and health (Ravallion 2012).

The strong suggestion in this analysis that India’s policy shift at the beginning of the 1990s, and the higher and more consistent economic growth that the country has seen since then, has had positive outcomes in terms of poverty reduction, is apparently confirmed in other analyses that focus more on the trends of the last two decades. Himanshu and Kunal Sen, whose analysis refers to the Tendulkar measure of the poverty line, present evidence that leads them to the ‘inescapable conclusion that poverty has declined faster [over the period 2004–05 to 2009–10, when India was experiencing ‘superfast’ growth] than in the previous period [1993–94 to 2004–05]’ (2014: 78). They estimate that the rate of poverty decline in the more recent period was 1.12 per cent per annum (even though their figures are lower, for reasons that they explain, than those of the Planning Commission), compared with 0.74 per cent per annum over the previous decade. One measure of the intensity of poverty, the poverty gap, shows marginally better improvement in the later period than the earlier one; but according to a second measure, the squared poverty gap, performance in the later period was worse. This suggests the possibility that the poverty decline was associated with an increasing share in the population of those who are vulnerable to falling into poverty (see also Dang and Lanjouw 2015). And Himanshu and Sen find slower improvements in consumption expenditure among the most vulnerable people – those employed as agricultural labourers in the rural economy, and as casual daily paid wage labour in the towns – by comparison with all households (Himanshu and Sen 2014: 81–3).

      This, ultimately mixed picture of recent trends, is borne out also in research by the World Bank economists Amber Narayan and Rinku Murgai (2016). They too refer to Tendulkar-based poverty estimates, and report that the pace of poverty reduction accelerated after 2004–05 – and then increased even further in the two years after 2009–10. This accelerated rate has been found surprising, however, given the deceleration of the economy in this period (as discussed in chapter 2), and it has also been pointed out that 2009–10 was a year of particularly severe drought – so we should probably not build too much upon the apparently sharp increase in the rate of poverty reduction after 2010 (see ‘Editorial’ 2013). Prosperity has been rising, Narayan and Murgai find, but the share of the bottom 40 per cent of the population in total consumption has fallen, with the rate of growth in this bottom group lagging behind the rate of growth of consumption for the population as a whole (in line with Himanshu and Sen’s observations regarding agricultural and casual labourers). The authors comment that poverty reduction would have been greater had consumption growth in the lower half of the population matched or exceeded average gains for the population. This finding recalls those of Petia Topolova for the period from 1993–94 to 2004–05, when there was also a shift in the distribution of income against the officially poor (in contrast to what had happened in the 1980s). Topolova concluded that ‘Distribution neutral growth would have generated a poverty decline in rural India that was 22 per cent higher; in urban areas, the decline in poverty would have been 76 per cent higher’ (2008: 8). Increasing inequality does matter, in relation to poverty reduction.

      Even more significantly, Narayan and Murgai also report a lot of churning, with a fairly high rate of downward as well as upward mobility (as Dang and Lanjouw 2015 also show), and they find that though the ‘middle class’, who are neither poor nor vulnerable to poverty, has increased as a share of the population (from 23 to 34 per cent), it is still the case that ‘Those who are in the vulnerable group struggle to rise into the middle class, despite the opportunities afforded by rapid economic growth’ (2016: 7). The point here is pithily put by a former civil servant, now professor of public policy, Anirudh Krishna, who writes:

Official statistics tend to depict a rosy-picture of fast declining poverty [exactly as the studies we have reviewed seem, at first, to show], suggesting a situation in which people are only moving up – and out of poverty. But India has one of the highest rates of poverty creation internationally. Between three and five per cent of the country’s population falls into poverty each year, adding to the large number of people already poor … Vulnerability to shocks is pervasive. Many who have moved out of poverty continue feeling its gravitational attraction (2017: 22).

      Krishna points out that, according to the findings of a fairly large body of micro-studies, large numbers of people experience big fluctuations in their economic circumstances, moving into and out of poverty. Research undertaken in different parts of India has shown between 55 and 88 per cent of all households as having experienced poverty for the entire year or for shorter periods (Krishna 2017: 99). Krishna provides a summary of data from studies of movement into and out of poverty in four states, and from three all-India studies. The most recent of these (for the period 1993–2005) shows 4 per cent more households moved into than out of poverty (2017, table 4.1, p. 102). And data from Krishna’s own studies in four states and two cities showed that more than 80 per cent of households that had succeeded in ‘escaping’ from poverty remained stuck within ‘the zone of poverty’. The pathway out of poverty most commonly followed – migration to the city – has inbuilt limitations because secure, formal jobs are very rarely open to poorly educated, low-skilled migrants from rural areas. The activities in which employment has been growing include, especially, construction, in which there are very few ‘good jobs’. Also, the numbers of those employed in transport, as drivers, have been growing relatively fast, as have the numbers employed in retail sales, in catering, as maids, and in personal services. Very few of these jobs will offer either much security or more than a rather basic income. In line with Krishna’s findings, Narayan and Murgai, and Dang and Lanjouw, find that higher levels of education, urban residence, being engaged in wage work, and belonging to social groups other than Dalit, adivasi or OBC, are positively associated with higher-than-average chances of upward mobility – suggesting that the objectives of ‘inclusive growth’ have been at least somewhat disappointed. We say more about this later.

Krishna makes the very important point that ‘The repeated observation of pervasive poverty creation suggests that something is deeply wrong with a policy that has a lot to say about raising people above the poverty line but contains nothing at all about preventing future poverty’ (2017: 103). His own extensive research into poverty dynamics in India has shown that though no single type of event, or particular household characteristic, is responsible for pushing people into poverty, ill-health has been found everywhere to be significant. He reports, ‘Between 3.5 per cent and 6.6 per cent of households in rural areas, and between 2.5 per cent and 5 per cent of urban households, averaging 5 per cent of the entire population, fall below the poverty line each year on account of poor health and the high cost of qualified medical care’ (2017: 105). So fixing health care, making it more accessible to poor people, and more effective, is the critically important preventive measure that will save people from being pitched into poverty. Yet public expenditure on health in India remains very low, at about 1 per cent of GDP, comparing very unfavourably with comparator countries – not that more funding alone will solve the problems СКАЧАТЬ