Key Details
The October 2026 World Bank Policy Research Working Paper, One Ladder Does Not Fit All: Jobs and Poverty Transitions Across the Globe, follows 191,627 households in 41 countries to examine how changes in household work are associated with changes in living standards. Its percentage-point estimates describe modelled changes in household employment—not the observed success rate of an individual changing jobs.
Across all countries, a shift towards wage work is associated with an 18.9-percentage-point higher probability of poverty exit, compared with 6.4 points for non-agricultural self-employment.
In low-income countries, the corresponding estimates are 13.2 points for wage work and 17.7 points for non-agricultural self-employment. The latter includes work in household businesses outside farming.
In lower-middle-income countries, including India, they are 7.8 and 4.4 points, respectively. These are group estimates, not separate findings for India.
Poverty prevention differs from poverty exit: Most forms of work are associated with a lower risk of falling into poverty, while the type of work matters more for escaping it.
India’s evidence comes from the India Human Development Survey’s 2005 and 2012 waves, covering 28,145 households in this analysis.
Poor Households Often Work — But in Different Kinds of Jobs
The paper challenges the idea that poverty chiefly reflects an absence of work. In its low-income-country sample, agricultural self-employment accounts for about 60% of working-age members in the poorest households. As economies develop, wage employment becomes more prevalent, and the relationship between job type and household living standards changes.
That helps explain why there is no universal “job ladder”. In the poorest economies, moving into non-farm self-employment is at least as strongly associated with leaving poverty as moving into wage work. In richer economies, wage work has the clearer association, while non-farm self-employment shows little detectable link to poverty exit.
Staying Out of Poverty Is a Different Problem
For a household already below the poverty line, which kind of work it gains is strongly associated with whether it moves above that line. For a household initially above it, transitions into several forms of work are associated with a lower risk of falling below it. A policy aimed at protecting livelihoods during a shock therefore addresses a different problem from one aimed at raising earnings enough to escape poverty.
The analysis follows changes among all working-age household members, not only household heads. It finds that women’s employment transitions are at least as strongly associated with poverty outcomes as men’s in the poorest and richest country groups; that result should not be presented as a separate estimate for India.
India’s Older Survey Requires Careful Interpretation
India contributes a large household panel, but its observations end in 2012. The researchers also classify Indian daily- and weekly-paid casual workers—including public-works workers—as non-wage workers, because their earnings and job security differ from regular salaried work. Employers cannot be identified separately in the India survey.
These choices make the cross-country comparison possible, but they matter when applying its categories to India’s labour market. The paper does not establish which current Indian programmes or job types cause households to escape poverty. Its estimates are associations
Policy Relevance
For India, the useful distinction is between protecting households from an income shock and enabling sustained upward mobility. Casual work or a small enterprise may help preserve earnings; neither should automatically be counted as a durable route out of poverty. At the same time, the lower-middle-income results do not justify treating self-employment as irrelevant while regular wage opportunities remain unevenly available.
Assessing India’s jobs policies therefore requires evidence on earnings, regularity of work and household poverty transitions, not employment counts alone. Newer longitudinal Indian data would be particularly valuable before using this paper’s older India sample to set present-day priorities.
Follow the Full Working Paper Here: One Ladder Does Not Fit All: Jobs and Poverty Transitions Across the Globe