Despite widespread agreement that economic policy in developing countries should promote pro-poor growth, there is relatively little consensus regarding the definition of pro-poor growth. This paper draws upon recent work on poverty decompositions to develop two simple measures of the extent to which growth is biased towards or away from the poor – that is – the poverty bias of growth. The measures are illustrated by application to grouped household data from two Indian states. This shows that growth between 1973 and 1989 in Andhra Pradesh was pro-poor whilst growth in Uttar Pradesh was biased against the poor.
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