Exploring the Poverty Question

The author argues that the claim that South Asia has seen a large reduction in poverty over the last three decades is a spurious claim. Using nearly 50 years of data from India's National Sample Survey, she shows that applying a constant nutrition standard over time, poverty had worsened considerably over the period of neoliberal reforms.

Utsa Patnaik taught economics at the Centre for Economic Studies and Planning, Jawaharlal Nehru University, from 1973 to 2010. Her main research interests lie in the areas of the agrarian question both in history and at present, colonialism and imperialism, and the origins and current prevalence of poverty. These issues have been explored in over one hundred academic papers and several books, including Peasant Class Differentiation (1987), The Long Transition (1999) and The Republic of Hunger (2008). Her last two books (co-authored with Prabhat Patnaik) are A Theory of Imperialism (2016) and Capital and Imperialism (2021).