Author: Christopher B. Barrett
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022657430X
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 425
Book Description
What circumstances or behaviors turn poverty into a cycle that perpetuates across generations? The answer to this question carries especially important implications for the design and evaluation of policies and projects intended to reduce poverty. Yet a major challenge analysts and policymakers face in understanding poverty traps is the sheer number of mechanisms—not just financial, but also environmental, physical, and psychological—that may contribute to the persistence of poverty all over the world. The research in this volume explores the hypothesis that poverty is self-reinforcing because the equilibrium behaviors of the poor perpetuate low standards of living. Contributions explore the dynamic, complex processes by which households accumulate assets and increase their productivity and earnings potential, as well as the conditions under which some individuals, groups, and economies struggle to escape poverty. Investigating the full range of phenomena that combine to generate poverty traps—gleaned from behavioral, health, and resource economics as well as the sociology, psychology, and environmental literatures—chapters in this volume also present new evidence that highlights both the insights and the limits of a poverty trap lens. The framework introduced in this volume provides a robust platform for studying well-being dynamics in developing economies.
The Economics of Poverty Traps
Author: Christopher B. Barrett
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022657430X
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 425
Book Description
What circumstances or behaviors turn poverty into a cycle that perpetuates across generations? The answer to this question carries especially important implications for the design and evaluation of policies and projects intended to reduce poverty. Yet a major challenge analysts and policymakers face in understanding poverty traps is the sheer number of mechanisms—not just financial, but also environmental, physical, and psychological—that may contribute to the persistence of poverty all over the world. The research in this volume explores the hypothesis that poverty is self-reinforcing because the equilibrium behaviors of the poor perpetuate low standards of living. Contributions explore the dynamic, complex processes by which households accumulate assets and increase their productivity and earnings potential, as well as the conditions under which some individuals, groups, and economies struggle to escape poverty. Investigating the full range of phenomena that combine to generate poverty traps—gleaned from behavioral, health, and resource economics as well as the sociology, psychology, and environmental literatures—chapters in this volume also present new evidence that highlights both the insights and the limits of a poverty trap lens. The framework introduced in this volume provides a robust platform for studying well-being dynamics in developing economies.
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022657430X
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 425
Book Description
What circumstances or behaviors turn poverty into a cycle that perpetuates across generations? The answer to this question carries especially important implications for the design and evaluation of policies and projects intended to reduce poverty. Yet a major challenge analysts and policymakers face in understanding poverty traps is the sheer number of mechanisms—not just financial, but also environmental, physical, and psychological—that may contribute to the persistence of poverty all over the world. The research in this volume explores the hypothesis that poverty is self-reinforcing because the equilibrium behaviors of the poor perpetuate low standards of living. Contributions explore the dynamic, complex processes by which households accumulate assets and increase their productivity and earnings potential, as well as the conditions under which some individuals, groups, and economies struggle to escape poverty. Investigating the full range of phenomena that combine to generate poverty traps—gleaned from behavioral, health, and resource economics as well as the sociology, psychology, and environmental literatures—chapters in this volume also present new evidence that highlights both the insights and the limits of a poverty trap lens. The framework introduced in this volume provides a robust platform for studying well-being dynamics in developing economies.
Poverty Traps and Microfinance
Author: Roberto Moro Visconti
Publisher: Ibidem Press
ISBN: 9783838202525
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 518
Book Description
Microfinance is a successful financial innovation to help the poor to sort out credit exclusion, which is one of the poverty traps that prevent billions of underserved, especially women, from escaping atavistic misery. Interconnected poverty traps range from misuse of natural resources (from blood diamonds to the oil curse) to conflict traps, demographic booming, being landlocked with bad neighbors or exposed to unfreedom. Other traps concern cultural backwardness, unsafe drinking and sanitation, food shortage up to starvation, illnesses or climatic shocks, causing mass migrations and unfair globalization. Microfinance, a grass-roots movement to provide credit to the neediest, can greatly help to dismantle at least some of these poverty traps, and thousands of mostly small institutions are competing in a market where demand from the poorest for financial services is potentially unlimited - while supply is not.While the success of microfinance, often ignited by foreign aid funding, has gone beyond any expectation, enormous problems are still on the ground. The road towards what is now considered microfinance's optimal goal - maximization of outreach to the poorest, combined with financial self-sustainability - is still full of obstacles. Prof. Moro Visconti's book, covering a vacuum in the existing literature, considers state-of-the-art microfinance within a broader framework of sustainable and long-term socio-economic development. With an innovative and reader friendly approach, Moro Visconti introduces the reader to the multidimensional causes of poverty and possible remedies. A cultural approach to the poverty traps, mixing its anthropological causes with possible bottom-up remedies, including microfinance, emerges as a stunning innovation. The book aims at a broad readership from practitioners to students and academics, as well as readers simply interested in solutions to the world-wide poverty problems.
Publisher: Ibidem Press
ISBN: 9783838202525
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 518
Book Description
Microfinance is a successful financial innovation to help the poor to sort out credit exclusion, which is one of the poverty traps that prevent billions of underserved, especially women, from escaping atavistic misery. Interconnected poverty traps range from misuse of natural resources (from blood diamonds to the oil curse) to conflict traps, demographic booming, being landlocked with bad neighbors or exposed to unfreedom. Other traps concern cultural backwardness, unsafe drinking and sanitation, food shortage up to starvation, illnesses or climatic shocks, causing mass migrations and unfair globalization. Microfinance, a grass-roots movement to provide credit to the neediest, can greatly help to dismantle at least some of these poverty traps, and thousands of mostly small institutions are competing in a market where demand from the poorest for financial services is potentially unlimited - while supply is not.While the success of microfinance, often ignited by foreign aid funding, has gone beyond any expectation, enormous problems are still on the ground. The road towards what is now considered microfinance's optimal goal - maximization of outreach to the poorest, combined with financial self-sustainability - is still full of obstacles. Prof. Moro Visconti's book, covering a vacuum in the existing literature, considers state-of-the-art microfinance within a broader framework of sustainable and long-term socio-economic development. With an innovative and reader friendly approach, Moro Visconti introduces the reader to the multidimensional causes of poverty and possible remedies. A cultural approach to the poverty traps, mixing its anthropological causes with possible bottom-up remedies, including microfinance, emerges as a stunning innovation. The book aims at a broad readership from practitioners to students and academics, as well as readers simply interested in solutions to the world-wide poverty problems.
Poor Economics
Author: Abhijit V. Banerjee
Publisher: PublicAffairs
ISBN: 1610391608
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 321
Book Description
The winners of the Nobel Prize in Economics upend the most common assumptions about how economics works in this gripping and disruptive portrait of how poor people actually live. Why do the poor borrow to save? Why do they miss out on free life-saving immunizations, but pay for unnecessary drugs? In Poor Economics, Abhijit V. Banerjee and Esther Duflo, two award-winning MIT professors, answer these questions based on years of field research from around the world. Called "marvelous, rewarding" by the Wall Street Journal, the book offers a radical rethinking of the economics of poverty and an intimate view of life on 99 cents a day. Poor Economics shows that creating a world without poverty begins with understanding the daily decisions facing the poor.
Publisher: PublicAffairs
ISBN: 1610391608
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 321
Book Description
The winners of the Nobel Prize in Economics upend the most common assumptions about how economics works in this gripping and disruptive portrait of how poor people actually live. Why do the poor borrow to save? Why do they miss out on free life-saving immunizations, but pay for unnecessary drugs? In Poor Economics, Abhijit V. Banerjee and Esther Duflo, two award-winning MIT professors, answer these questions based on years of field research from around the world. Called "marvelous, rewarding" by the Wall Street Journal, the book offers a radical rethinking of the economics of poverty and an intimate view of life on 99 cents a day. Poor Economics shows that creating a world without poverty begins with understanding the daily decisions facing the poor.
Why Doesn't Microfinance Work?
Author: Milford Bateman
Publisher: Zed Books Ltd.
ISBN: 1848138954
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 384
Book Description
Since its emergence in the 1970s, microfinance has risen to become one of the most high-profile policies to address poverty in developing and transition countries. It is beloved of rock stars, movie stars, royalty, high-profile politicians and ‘troubleshooting’ economists. In this provocative and controversial analysis, Milford Bateman reveals that microfinance doesn’t actually work. In fact, the case for it has been largely built on hype, on egregious half-truths and – latterly – on the Wall Street-style greed of those promoting and working in microfinance. Using a multitude of case studies, from India to Cambodia, Bolivia to Uganda, Serbia to Mexico, Bateman demonstrates that microfi nance actually constitutes a major barrier to sustainable economic and social development, and thus also to sustainable poverty reduction. As developing and transition countries attempt to repair the devastation wrought by the global financial crisis, Why Doesn’t Microfinance Work? argues forcefully that the role of microfinance in development policy urgently needs to be reconsidered.
Publisher: Zed Books Ltd.
ISBN: 1848138954
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 384
Book Description
Since its emergence in the 1970s, microfinance has risen to become one of the most high-profile policies to address poverty in developing and transition countries. It is beloved of rock stars, movie stars, royalty, high-profile politicians and ‘troubleshooting’ economists. In this provocative and controversial analysis, Milford Bateman reveals that microfinance doesn’t actually work. In fact, the case for it has been largely built on hype, on egregious half-truths and – latterly – on the Wall Street-style greed of those promoting and working in microfinance. Using a multitude of case studies, from India to Cambodia, Bolivia to Uganda, Serbia to Mexico, Bateman demonstrates that microfi nance actually constitutes a major barrier to sustainable economic and social development, and thus also to sustainable poverty reduction. As developing and transition countries attempt to repair the devastation wrought by the global financial crisis, Why Doesn’t Microfinance Work? argues forcefully that the role of microfinance in development policy urgently needs to be reconsidered.
Financial Exclusion and the Poverty Trap
Author: Pamela Lenton
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136626395
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 230
Book Description
This book addresses one of the main causes of poverty, financial exclusion – the inability to access finance from the high-street banks. People on low or irregular incomes typically have to resort to loan sharks, ‘doorstep lenders’ and other informal credit sources, a predicament which makes escape from the poverty trap doubly difficult. This book will be vital reading for those concerned with social policy, microfinance and anti-poverty policies in industrialised countries and around the world.
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136626395
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 230
Book Description
This book addresses one of the main causes of poverty, financial exclusion – the inability to access finance from the high-street banks. People on low or irregular incomes typically have to resort to loan sharks, ‘doorstep lenders’ and other informal credit sources, a predicament which makes escape from the poverty trap doubly difficult. This book will be vital reading for those concerned with social policy, microfinance and anti-poverty policies in industrialised countries and around the world.
Poverty Traps
Author: Samuel Bowles
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691170932
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 251
Book Description
Much popular belief--and public policy--rests on the idea that those born into poverty have it in their power to escape. But the persistence of poverty and ever-growing economic inequality around the world have led many economists to seriously question the model of individual economic self-determination when it comes to the poor. In Poverty Traps, Samuel Bowles, Steven Durlauf, Karla Hoff, and the book's other contributors argue that there are many conditions that may trap individuals, groups, and whole economies in intractable poverty. For the first time the editors have brought together the perspectives of economics, economic history, and sociology to assess what we know--and don't know--about such traps. Among the sources of the poverty of nations, the authors assign a primary role to social and political institutions, ranging from corruption to seemingly benign social customs such as kin systems. Many of the institutions that keep nations poor have deep roots in colonial history and persist long after their initial causes are gone. Neighborhood effects--influences such as networks, role models, and aspirations--can create hard-to-escape pockets of poverty even in rich countries. Similar individuals in dissimilar socioeconomic environments develop different preferences and beliefs that can transmit poverty or affluence from generation to generation. The book presents evidence of harmful neighborhood effects and discusses policies to overcome them, with attention to the uncertainty that exists in evaluating such policies.
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691170932
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 251
Book Description
Much popular belief--and public policy--rests on the idea that those born into poverty have it in their power to escape. But the persistence of poverty and ever-growing economic inequality around the world have led many economists to seriously question the model of individual economic self-determination when it comes to the poor. In Poverty Traps, Samuel Bowles, Steven Durlauf, Karla Hoff, and the book's other contributors argue that there are many conditions that may trap individuals, groups, and whole economies in intractable poverty. For the first time the editors have brought together the perspectives of economics, economic history, and sociology to assess what we know--and don't know--about such traps. Among the sources of the poverty of nations, the authors assign a primary role to social and political institutions, ranging from corruption to seemingly benign social customs such as kin systems. Many of the institutions that keep nations poor have deep roots in colonial history and persist long after their initial causes are gone. Neighborhood effects--influences such as networks, role models, and aspirations--can create hard-to-escape pockets of poverty even in rich countries. Similar individuals in dissimilar socioeconomic environments develop different preferences and beliefs that can transmit poverty or affluence from generation to generation. The book presents evidence of harmful neighborhood effects and discusses policies to overcome them, with attention to the uncertainty that exists in evaluating such policies.
Microfinance and Poverty
Author: Shahidur R. Khandker
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Electronic book
Languages : en
Pages :
Book Description
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Electronic book
Languages : en
Pages :
Book Description
School Meals, Educational Achievement, and School Competition
Author: Christel Vermeersch
Publisher: World Bank Publications
ISBN:
Category : Academic achievement
Languages : en
Pages : 52
Book Description
Vermeersch and Kremer examine the effects of subsidized school meals on school participation, educational achievement, and school finance in a developing country setting. They use data from a program that was implemented in 25 randomly chosen preschools in a pool of 50. Children's school participation was 30 percent higher in the treatment group than in the comparison group. The meals program led to higher curriculum test scores, but only in schools where the teacher was relatively experienced prior to the program. The school meals displaced teaching time and led to larger class sizes. Despite improved incentives, teacher absenteeism remained at a high level of 30 percent. Treatment schools raised their fees, and comparison schools close to treatment schools decreased their fees. Some of the price effects are caused by a combination of capacity constraints and pupil transfers that would not happen if the school meals were ordered in all schools. The intention-to-treat estimator of the effect of the randomized program incorporates those price effects, and therefore it should be considered a lower bound on the effect of generalized school meals. This insight on price effects generalizes to other randomized program evaluations. This paper--a product of the Poverty Reduction and Economic Management 2, Africa Technical Families--is part of a larger effort in the region to increase our understanding of the impact of programs aimed at reaching the Millennium Development Goals.
Publisher: World Bank Publications
ISBN:
Category : Academic achievement
Languages : en
Pages : 52
Book Description
Vermeersch and Kremer examine the effects of subsidized school meals on school participation, educational achievement, and school finance in a developing country setting. They use data from a program that was implemented in 25 randomly chosen preschools in a pool of 50. Children's school participation was 30 percent higher in the treatment group than in the comparison group. The meals program led to higher curriculum test scores, but only in schools where the teacher was relatively experienced prior to the program. The school meals displaced teaching time and led to larger class sizes. Despite improved incentives, teacher absenteeism remained at a high level of 30 percent. Treatment schools raised their fees, and comparison schools close to treatment schools decreased their fees. Some of the price effects are caused by a combination of capacity constraints and pupil transfers that would not happen if the school meals were ordered in all schools. The intention-to-treat estimator of the effect of the randomized program incorporates those price effects, and therefore it should be considered a lower bound on the effect of generalized school meals. This insight on price effects generalizes to other randomized program evaluations. This paper--a product of the Poverty Reduction and Economic Management 2, Africa Technical Families--is part of a larger effort in the region to increase our understanding of the impact of programs aimed at reaching the Millennium Development Goals.
Microfinance, Risk Management and Poverty
Author: Jennefer Sebstad
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781888753219
Category : Economic assistance
Languages : en
Pages : 115
Book Description
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781888753219
Category : Economic assistance
Languages : en
Pages : 115
Book Description
The Future of Microfinance
Author: Ira W. Lieberman
Publisher: Brookings Institution Press
ISBN: 0815737645
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 493
Book Description
A major source of financing for the poor and no longer a niche industry Over the past four decades, microfinance—the provision of loans, savings, and insurance to small businesses and entrepreneurs shut out of traditional capital markets—has grown from a niche service in Bangladesh and a few other countries to a significant global source of financing. Some 200 million people globally now receive support from microfinance institutions, with most of the recipients in the developing world. In the beginning, much of the microfinance industry was managed by non-governmental organizations, but today the majority of these institutions are commercial and regulated by governments, and they provide safe places for the poor to save, as well as offering much-needed capital and other financial services. Now out of infancy, the microfinance industry faces major challenges, including its ability to deal with mobile banking and other technology and concerns that some markets are now over-saturated with microfinance. How the industry deals with these and other challenges will determine whether it will continue to grow or will be subsumed within the larger global financial sector. This book is based on the results of a workshop at Lehigh University among thirty-four leaders in the industry. The editors, working with contributions from more than a dozen leading authorities in the field, tell the important story of how microfinance developed, how it has met the needs of hundreds of millions of people, and they address key questions about how it can continue to meet those needs in the future.
Publisher: Brookings Institution Press
ISBN: 0815737645
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 493
Book Description
A major source of financing for the poor and no longer a niche industry Over the past four decades, microfinance—the provision of loans, savings, and insurance to small businesses and entrepreneurs shut out of traditional capital markets—has grown from a niche service in Bangladesh and a few other countries to a significant global source of financing. Some 200 million people globally now receive support from microfinance institutions, with most of the recipients in the developing world. In the beginning, much of the microfinance industry was managed by non-governmental organizations, but today the majority of these institutions are commercial and regulated by governments, and they provide safe places for the poor to save, as well as offering much-needed capital and other financial services. Now out of infancy, the microfinance industry faces major challenges, including its ability to deal with mobile banking and other technology and concerns that some markets are now over-saturated with microfinance. How the industry deals with these and other challenges will determine whether it will continue to grow or will be subsumed within the larger global financial sector. This book is based on the results of a workshop at Lehigh University among thirty-four leaders in the industry. The editors, working with contributions from more than a dozen leading authorities in the field, tell the important story of how microfinance developed, how it has met the needs of hundreds of millions of people, and they address key questions about how it can continue to meet those needs in the future.