Research in Centre for Studies in Science Policy: Angus Deaton: "High quality and transparent data needed for informed debates"

"I am thrilled to have been awarded the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 2015. I am even more thrilled that the Nobel committee highlighted the work that my collaborators and I have done on India. My work shows how important it is that independent researchers have access to data, so that government statistics can be checked, and so that the democratic debate within India can be informed by the different interpretations of different scholars. High quality, open, transparent and uncensored data are needed to support democracy. I have used data from India's famous National Sample Surveys to measure poverty. Perhaps the biggest threat to these measures is that there is an enormous discrepancy between the National Accounts Statistics (NAS) and the surveys. The surveys "find" less consumption than do the national accounts, whose measures also grow more rapidly. While I am sure that part of the problem lies with the surveys — as more people spend more on a wider variety of things, the total is harder to capture — there are weaknesses on the NAS side too, and I have been distressed over the years that critics of the surveys have got a lot more attention than critics of the growth measures. Perhaps no one wants to risk a change that will diminish India's spectacular (at least as measured) rate of growth? We need better work resolving this issue. Without it, we cannot be sure what is happening to either poverty or inequality in India today. Measures that should be known and indisputable become instead the subject of bitter partisan debates. Poverty is more than the lack of money and my work with Jean Dreze has documented the improving, but still dreadful, state of nutrition in India ..."