per person).<sup>12</sup> Figure 4 displays the growth incidence curves for China and India, for the periods 1990 to 1999 and 1993 to 1999, respectively. In both cases, growth rates at the bottom of the distribution were lower than those at the top. The gradient is less steep for India.<sup>13</sup> Growth rates in China in the 1990s rise sharply as we move up the income ladder, with the annual rate of growth in the 1990s increasing from about 3 percent for the poorest percentile to over 10 percent for the richest. While the growth rate in the overall mean was 6.2 percent, the mean growth rate for the poorest 20 percent (roughly according with China’s “$1 a day” poverty rate in 1995) was 4.0 percent. The GIC for India between 1993 and 1999 shows a slight U shape, with the lowest growth rates—around 1 percent—for people around the 10<sup>th</sup> percentile, and a smaller difference between growth rates at the top (close to 4 percent) and those at the bottom (just over 1 percent) than was the case for China.

**_Figure 4: Growth incidence curves for China (1990–1999) and India (1993–1999)_**

<!-- Start of picture text --> 10<br>9<br>8<br>7<br>6 China 1990-1999<br>5<br>4<br>3<br>2 India 1993/94-1999/00<br>1<br>0<br>0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90<br>The poorest p% of population ranked by per capita income/expenditure<br>per person (%)<br>Annual growth in income/expenditure<br><!-- End of picture text -->

**_Source:_** Ravallion and Chen (2003) for China (using household income) and Ravallion (2004b) for India (household expenditure on consumption).

As we have noted, large sample nationally representative surveys (such as used to construct figure 4) do not typically pick up what is happening at the extreme upper tails of the distribution. In the case of India, evidence from other sources indicates that incomes at the top end have risen dramatically. For instance, Banerjee and Piketty (2005), based on a study of tax returns, report that the super-rich in India—that is, those at the 99.99th percentile—experienced 12 On the precise definition and properties of the GIC see Ravallion and Chen (2003). 13 The shape of the expenditure-GIC for India for the 1990s depends critically on what adjustment is made for the comparability problems between the 1999/2000 survey and earlier surveys. The GIC shown in Figure 5 is based on the estimates produced by Sundaram and Tendulkar (2003), who resolve the comparability problem by estimating consumption expenditures based on a common “mixed reference period” for categories of consumption. The rural and urban distributions were then aggregated assuming urban-rural cost-of-living differentials of 33 percent and 38 percent for 1993/94 and 1999/00 respectively, based on updated poverty lines as used in Ravallion and Datt (2002). This roughly matches the GIC implied by estimates obtained by Deaton (2001), who uses an alternative method to make the surveys comparable. If, however, no attempt is made to correct for the comparability problem, and one simply uses the “unadjusted” primary estimates from each of the surveys, the GIC suggests a much more pro-poor pattern of growth, with growth rates declining from over 2 percent for the poorest percentile to around 1 percent at the top of the distribution (Ravallion, 2004).

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