Persistent, expected and innate poverty: estimates for semi-arid rural South India, 1975–1984

This paper uses nine years of panel data on 170 rural households in southern India to calculate intertemporal measures of poverty. These include measures of (1) expected poverty that identify households likely to remain poor on average during any year; (2) innate poverty that identify households that are poor owning to deep-rooted characteristics that cannot easily be changed in the short run; and (3) persistent poverty that identify households whose incomes fall below a fixed poverty line over a number of years. The poverty rates estimated for the sample with the three measures are 61 percent, 48 percent, and 22 percent, respectively.