Poverty measurement is an unsettled issue, both conceptually and methodologically. Since poverty is a process as wellas an outcome, many come out of it while others may be fallmg mto it. The net effect of these two parallel processes is a proportion commonly identified as the 'head count ratio', but these ratios hide the fundamental dynamism that characterises poverty in practice. The most recent povertyreestimates by an expert group has also missed the crucial dynamism. In a study conducted on 13,000 households which represented the entire country in 1993-94 and again on 2004- 05, it was found that in the ten-year period 18.2% rural population moved out of poverty whereas another 22.1 % fell into it over this period. This net increase of about four percentage points was seen to have a considerable variation across states and regions Which of the followingis an assumption which isimplicitin the facts stated in the above paragraph ?