Vivek's Commentary

Pew Research Centre recently published their reports which suggest that due to the pandemic global middle class will face a crisis and will become “Poor”. For India, it is suggested that the Pandemic pushes 32 million Indians out of the middle class. I have two main objections related to the reports/articles.  The first is related to the methodology. The findings are based on the extrapolation of previous surveys (pre-pandemic surveys) based on regional income distributions from the World Bank’s PovcalNet database. Therefore, the findings are not based on household surveys but on extrapolation. And that would obviously lead to the decline in income of every income category (poor, low income, middle, high-income category) with the same rate (as the overall size is contracted) which Pew Research article also assumes in methodology. This assumption misses one important point: the association between inequality, poverty, and growth is dynamic and also get affected by the pandemic. Assuming