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Joshua Merfeld
Joshua Merfeld is an Associate Professor at the KDI School of Public Policy and Management in Sejong City, South Korea. He is also a Research Affiliate at IZA (Institute of Labor Economics) in Bonn, Germany. His research and teaching interests include the microeconomics of development, applied microeconometrics, labour markets in developing countries, and poverty. His work has appeared in the Journal of Development Economics, the American Journal of Agricultural Economics, and the Journal of Development Studies.
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India’s poverty rate does not measure what you think it does
Like all national poverty rates, India’s poverty rate is interpreted as the share of the population that is poor in a given year. In this post, Merfeld and Morduch argue that, in practice, India’s poverty rate is better thought of as the approximate fraction of the year that households experience poverty. They describe how this is rooted in the nature of data collection, and how it changes understandings of poverty and policy in the country.
