Swati Dutta

Email: swati.dutta@ifmr.ac.in


Prior to joining the PhD programme at the Institute for Financial Management and Research (IFMR), recognised by the University of Madras, Swati Dutta completed an MPhil in Applied Economics at the Centre for Development Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University (2008–2010) and an MSc in Economics, with first-class first position, from Vidyasagar University (2004–2006). She worked as ‘project linked personnel’ in the ‘Construction and Analysis of Regional Variation of Social Development Indices in India’ project, sponsored by the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation, Government of India, in the Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata, for the period May 2007 to July 2008. Her broad area of research includes development economics, with a special emphasis on human development, economic growth, regional disparity and multidimensional poverty with reference to Indian states.




Papers Published in World Economics:


Youth Employment Crisis in India
Author: Swati Dutta

The global financial crisis and the subsequent uneven recovery have underscored the need for Africa’s resilience to output and other shocks originated in the rest of the world. A comparison of two regional economic communities – the East African Community (EAC) and the Southern Africa Customs Union (SACU) – suggests that deeper intra-regional, and in particular intra-industry, trade ties have contributed to the EAC’s resilience to external output shocks. More broadly, intra-regional and intra-African trade with fast-growing economies, together with geographically diversified trade links, can strengthen the capacity of African countries to absorb global output shocks. Besides helping shield countries from external shocks, intra-regional trade also supports economic diversification and participation in regional value chains.

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Measuring Multidimensional Vulnerability in India

This paper examines the relationship between multidimensional poverty and multidimensional vulnerability. Unlike poverty, which describes the status of a household at a point of time, vulnerability captures the likelihood of a household falling into poverty, given the current status of the household. The paper has used data from the India Human Development Survey, 2005, employing a multidimensional measure both at the all-India level and the state level. The results indicate the superiority of the multidimensional measure over the one-dimensional income measure because policy can be pointed towards addressing the dimension of poverty that is lacking and that is the cause of some states’ vulnerability to poverty.

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Asset Poverty in India
Author: Swati Dutta

In order to formulate policy to target the correctly identified rural poor in India, focus on an income poverty measure alone is insufficient. The purpose of this research is to study a new area of poverty measurement based on data that detail a household’s access to basic assets. The study has used the secondary data source provided by the Demographic and Health Survey (DHS) for the time period of 1992, 1998 and 2005. In order to construct the asset index the technique of multiple correspondence analysis is used. A discussion of trends in asset poverty in various states in India follows, together with the policies they need to adopt depending on their state of poverty.

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