Why growth is not enough: Household poverty dynamics in Northeast Gujarat, India

Despite high growth rates in Gujarat, exceeding 9 per cent per year over the decade of the 1990s, poverty in 36 villages located in the northeastern part of this state has changed hardly at all. In these villages, 9.5 per cent of households escaped from poverty over the past 25 years, but 6.3 per cent of households became poor at the same time. Escape and descent are not symmetric: different reasons account for escaping poverty than those for declining into poverty. Growth alone is hardly sufficient to achieve poverty reduction on any significant scale. Public policies will be needed to address directly the separate causes for descent into poverty.