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"Measuring Global Poverty" published on by Oxford University Press.

Since the economic reforms of the early 1990s, the Indian economy witnessed a
rapid rise in the mean income level, and, simultaneously, changes in the distribution of
income. This study tries to capture how these changes affected poverty levels across
major states in India. Total change in poverty is decomposed into the changes due to
a rise in the mean income level and due to changes in the distribution of income. It
is observed that, in India, rapid growth led to a significant decline in poverty though
changes in the distribution of income which adversely affected the poor.

Current estimates of global poverty vary substantially across studies. In this paper we undertake a novel sensitivity analysis to highlight the importance of methodological choices in estimating global poverty. We measure global poverty using different data sources, parametric and nonparametric estimation methods, and multiple poverty lines. Our results indicate that estimates of global poverty vary significantly when they are based alternately on data from household surveys versus national accounts but are relatively consistent across different estimation methods. The decline in poverty over