At Yale Global Online, Pranab Bardhan argues:

While expansion of exports of labor-intensive manufacturing lifted many people out of poverty in China during the last decade (but not in India, where exports are still mainly skill- and capital-intensive), the more important reason for the dramatic decline of poverty over the last three decades may actually lie elsewhere.

Estimates made at the World Bank suggest that two-thirds of the total decline in the numbers of poor people – below the admittedly crude poverty line of $1 a day per capita – in China between 1981 and 2004 already happened by the mid-1980s, before the big strides in foreign trade and investment in China during the 1990s and later. Much of the extreme poverty was concentrated in rural areas, and its large decline in the first half of the 1980s is perhaps mainly a result of the spurt in agricultural growth following de-collectivization, egalitarian land reform and readjustment of farm procurement prices – mostly internal factors that had little to do with global integration.

To read more:

http://yaleglobal.yale.edu/display.article?id=9819