About

Dr. Shatakshee Dhongde is a Professor of Economics at Georgia Tech, where she also serves as the Associate Dean of Academic Affairs at the Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts since 2021. She earned her Ph.D. from the University of California, Riverside. Her research primarily focuses on the economics of poverty, and she was among the first scholars to provide consistent estimates of multidimensional poverty in the United States. Dr. Dhongde has published more than 20 refereed journal articles and book chapters and has presented her research at numerous national and international forums, including the World Bank and the United Nations. Her work has received media attention from outlets such as the BBC and NPR. In addition to her academic roles at Georgia Tech, she holds several positions in national and international economic societies, including President-elect of the International Association of Review of Income and Wealth, Fellow of the Society for Economic Measurement, and Research Affiliate with the Institute of Research on Poverty at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. She also serves on the editorial board of the Review of Income and Wealth and the governing board of the Shepherd Higher Education Consortium on Poverty. Dr. Dhongde has been recognized with multiple awards, including the Dean George C. Griffin Faculty of the Year Award in 2022, the Mary S. and Richard B. Inman, Jr. Faculty Excellence Award in 2021, and the Ivan Allen Jr. Legacy Award in 2019.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Economics
• Economic growth
• Demography
• Development economics
• Geography
• Computer Science
• Demographic economics
• Medicine
• Political Science
• Econometrics
• Economic geography
• Labour economics
• Socioeconomics
• Gender studies

Selected publications

• Rapid Economic Growth but Rising Poverty Segregation: Will Viet Nam Meet the SDGs for Equitable Development?

  Washington, DC: World Bank eBooks · 2025-02-20

  bookOpen access

  Viet Nam is widely regarded as a success story for its impressive economic growth and poverty reduction in the last few decades. Yet, recent evidence indicates that the country’s economic growth has not been uniform. Compiling and analyzing new, extensive province-level data from the Vietnam Household Living Standards Surveys spanning 2002 to 2020 and other data sources, this paper finds within-province inequality to be much larger than between-province inequality. Furthermore, this inequality gap has been rising over time. Despite the country’s fast poverty reduction, the poor were increasingly segregated in certain provinces, particularly those with a larger ethnic minority population. The analysis finds a beneficial impact of economic growth on poverty reduction, but this can depend on inequality levels. It also finds that greater inequality has had negative effects on economic growth but varying negative effects on different poverty indicators. The paper provides supportive evidence of the beneficial impact of economic transitions from agriculture to non-agriculture. The results suggest that policy makers in Viet Nam should focus on reducing spatial disparities and income inequality to attain sustainable economic development.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• COVID-19 and mortality among infants: Evidence from India

  Journal of Health Economics · 2025-03-30 · 1 citations

  articleCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Rapid Economic Growth but Rising Poverty Segregation: Will Vietnam Meet the <scp>SDGs</scp> for Equitable Development?

  Review of Development Economics · 2024-12-13 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access

  ABSTRACT Vietnam is widely regarded as a success story for its impressive economic growth and poverty reduction in the last few decades. Yet, recent evidence indicates that the country's economic growth has not been uniform. Compiling and analyzing new extensive province‐level data from the Vietnam Household Living Standards Surveys (VHLSSs) spanning 2002 and 2020 and other data sources, we find within‐province inequality to be much larger than between‐province inequality. Furthermore, this inequality gap is rising over time. Despite the country's fast poverty reduction, the poor were increasingly segregated in certain provinces, particularly those with a larger ethnic minority population. We find beneficial impact of economic growth on poverty reduction, but this can depend on inequality levels. We also find greater inequality to have negative effects on economic growth but varying negative effects on different poverty indicators. We also find some supportive evidence for the beneficial impact of economic transitions from agriculture to non‐agriculture. Our results suggest that policy makers in Vietnam should focus on reducing spatial disparities and income inequality to attain sustainable economic development.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Poverty and Disadvantage throughout Childhood in the United States

  Child Indicators Research · 2024-10-14 · 2 citations

  articleSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• COVID-19 Lockdown and Neonatal Mortality: Evidence from India

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2023-01-01 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access
  PublisherDOI

• Inequality in multidimensional well‐being in the United States

  Review of Income and Wealth · 2023-11-15 · 4 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  In this paper we provide a framework to measure an individual's multidimensional well‐being and discuss two approaches to measuring inequality in multidimensional well‐being. The framework is used to study inequality in multidimensional well‐being in the United States in the last decade. Using data from the Current Population Survey on three well‐being indicators, namely, income, health, and education, we first compute a multidimensional well‐being index for every individual in the sample and then study inequality of well‐being thus obtained. We find that inequality in well‐being increased between 2010 and 2014 and decreased between 2014 and 2019. We test the sensitivity of our results by using alternative measures of inequality and attaching alternative weights to well‐being indicators.

  PublisherDOI

• Impact of Drought on Children’s Educational Outcomes

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2023-01-01 · 3 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Rapid Economic Growth But Rising Poverty Segregation: Will Vietnam Meet the Sdgs for Equitable Development?

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2023-01-01 · 3 citations

  articleOpen access
  PublisherDOI

• Multidimensional Hardships in the U.S. During the COVID-19 Pandemic

  Social Indicators Research · 2023-08-18 · 2 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Poverty in India

  Edward Elgar Publishing eBooks · 2023-03-17

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  This chapter provides readers a succinct summary of how official poverty estimates are measured in India, what have been some of the major debates and what has been the history in terms of setting poverty thresholds. It also provides a glimpse at some of the more recent developments in poverty measurement in India.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Robert Haveman

  University of Wisconsin–Madison

  10 shared

• Hai‐Anh Dang

  10 shared

• Camelia Minoiu

  Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta

  9 shared

• Prasanta K. Pattanaik

  6 shared

• Christopher W. Morris

  5 shared

• Yongsheng Xu

  Chinese Academy of Sciences

  3 shared

• Lucio Esposito

  University of East Anglia

  3 shared

• Dustin Chambers

  3 shared

Labs

• Shatakshee Dhongde LabPI

Awards & honors

• Dean George C. Griffin Faculty of the Year Award (2022)
• Mary S. and Richard B. Inman, Jr. Faculty Excellence Award (…
• Fellow, Society for Economic Measurement (2019)
• The Ivan Allen Jr. Legacy Award at Georgia Tech (2019)
• President-elect, International Association of Review of Inco…