Download or read book The Economics of Poverty Traps written by Christopher B. Barrett and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2018-12-07 with total page 425 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book Poverty Traps written by Samuel Bowles and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2016-05-31 with total page 251 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book Handbook of Microfinance Financial Inclusion and Development written by Valentina Hartarska and published by Edward Elgar Publishing. This book was released on 2023-02-14 with total page 495 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This timely Handbook collates a range of evidence from top scholars in the field to help readers understand who microfinance reaches, how it helps, and why clients come back. It offers updated views on important concepts that enable a broader framework for understanding poverty and the corresponding financial needs of poor households.

Download or read book Research Handbook on Alternative Finance written by Franklin Allen and published by Edward Elgar Publishing. This book was released on 2024-04-12 with total page 367 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Promoting a comparative perspective, this comprehensive Research Handbook aids in the understanding of alternative finance and its values in a global setting. Readers are encouraged to view alternative finance through the lens of economic mechanisms rather than terminology.

Download or read book The Economics of Financial Inclusion written by Firdous Ahmad Malik and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2024-10-15 with total page 357 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers a thorough examination of the economics of financial inclusion and management from a contemporary standpoint. It covers a vast array of financial inclusion-related topics, surveying economies around the globe and analyzes the factors that contribute to both financial inclusion and exclusion. The book discusses the role of technology, examining how technological advances have revolutionized financial services and increased access to populations that were previously underserved. It studies the intersection of financial inclusion and sustainability, highlighting the significance of green finance and its role in fostering inclusive and sustainable economic growth. Financial literacy and the theories underlying financial inclusion efforts are examined, as is the impact of financial criminality. Further, the authors consider regional development and the extant gaps in financial inclusion as well as the urban-rural divide, investigating disparities between urban and rural areas and proposing strategies to bridge the gap. They also assess the effect of inflation and recession and discuss how monetary and fiscal policies can impact inclusion initiatives. The book concludes with a management perspective on financial inclusion, with chapters devoted to various aspects of administering inclusive financial systems. It combines theoretical insights with empirical evidence and case studies, from both developing and developed nations, to illustrate the various approaches and challenges and to provide a comprehensive understanding of worldwide advancements and developments. The comparative approach provides readers with insights into diverse strategies and best practices for overcoming challenges and obstacles and for promoting financial inclusion in various economic contexts. Overall, readers will benefit from the book's comprehensive analysis and exhaustive coverage. It is an invaluable resource for advanced students, scholars, researchers and policymakers.

Download or read book Law and the Economy in a Young Democracy written by Tirthankar Roy and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2022-02-08 with total page 309 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Tirthankar Roy and Anand V. Swamy trace India's economic growth since 1947 and the legal reforms that have allowed it to settle in, however unevenly and tenuously, in the shadow of the stagnating effects of colonial rule. Law and the Economy in a Young Democracy portrays a long shadow of Indian "path dependence"-the persistence of colonial-era legal practices and institutions-interrupted by a series of reactive, dramatic departures from colonial inertia aimed at achieving quick or corrective growth and regulation. Roy and Swamy address five principal questions: How have new laws emerged in India? Does the explanation lie with colonialism or with post-independence politics and economic change? How were laws shaped by egalitarian goals in the Indian democracy with its universal adult suffrage? When did laws constrain economic growth? And to what extent did case law and legislation affect the evolution of law, which was also shaped by politics and the quality of legal infrastructure? Each of these questions brings together different threads of India's economic transformation and social/political history, and the format allows the authors to go deep on the country's most important market sectors and their surrounding economic and political histories. These sections include: colonialist influences on laws governing land and natural resources; politics and labor; and the alternating stifling effects of the country's economic policies and legal systems. In Roy and Swamy's telling, inadequate legal infrastructure has often been the country's primary impediment to economic growth during the last century, and it remains a primary reason that India's future may not be as bright as advertised"--

Download or read book Randomized Control Trials in the Field of Development written by Florent Bédécarrats and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2020-09-17 with total page 448 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In October 2019, Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo, and Michael Kremer jointly won the 51st Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel "for their experimental approach to alleviating global poverty." But what is the exact scope of their experimental method, known as randomized control trials (RCTs)? Which sorts of questions are RCTs able to address and which do they fail to answer? The first of its kind, Randomized Control Trials in the Field of Development: A Critical Perspective provides answers to these questions, explaining how RCTs work, what they can achieve, why they sometimes fail, how they can be improved and why other methods are both useful and necessary. Bringing together leading specialists in the field from a range of backgrounds and disciplines (economics, econometrics, mathematics, statistics, political economy, socioeconomics, anthropology, philosophy, global health, epidemiology, and medicine), it presents a full and coherent picture of the main strengths and weaknesses of RCTs in the field of development. Looking beyond the epistemological, political, and ethical differences underlying many of the disagreements surrounding RCTs, it explores the implementation of RCTs on the ground, outside of their ideal theoretical conditions and reveals some unsuspected uses and effects, their disruptive potential, but also their political uses. The contributions uncover the implicit worldview that many RCTs draw on and disseminate, and probe the gap between the method's narrow scope and its success, while also proposing improvements and alternatives. Without disputing the contribution of RCTs to scientific knowledge, Randomized Control Trials in the Field of Development warns against the potential dangers of their excessive use, arguing that the best use for RCTs is not necessarily that which immediately springs to mind. Written in plain language, this book offers experts and laypeople alike a unique opportunity to come to an informed and reasoned judgement on RCTs and what they can bring to development.

Download or read book How to Achieve Inclusive Growth written by Valerie Cerra and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2022-01-22 with total page 901 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. Rising inequality and widespread poverty, social unrest and polarization, gender and ethnic disparities, declining social mobility, economic fragility, unbalanced growth due to technology and globalization, and existential danger from climate change are urgent global concerns of our day. These issues are intertwined. They therefore require a holistic framework to examine their interplay and bring the various strands together. Leading academic economists have partnered with experts from several international institutions to explain the sources and scale of these challenges. They gather a wide array of empirical evidence and country experiences to lay out practical policy solutions and to devise a comprehensive and unified plan of action for combatting these economic and social disparities. This authoritative book is accessible to policy makers, students, and the general public interested in how to craft a brighter future by building a sustainable, green, and inclusive society in the years ahead.

Download or read book Handbook of Development Policy written by Habib, Zafarullah and published by Edward Elgar Publishing. This book was released on 2021-09-07 with total page 592 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This authoritative Handbook provides a thorough exploration of development policy from both scholarly and practical perspectives and offers insights into the policy process dynamics and a range of specific policy issues, including corruption and network governance.

Download or read book The Future of Microfinance written by Ira W. Lieberman and published by Brookings Institution Press. This book was released on 2020-06-30 with total page 493 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book Escalation Management in International Crises written by Jonathan Wilkenfeld and published by Edward Elgar Publishing. This book was released on 2023-02-14 with total page 495 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Based on cutting-edge research by an interdisciplinary team of academics and policy analysts, this insightful and timely book considers the role of great power competition in what has come to be known as gray zone conflict. Taking the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine as a backdrop for some of its critical evaluation, it also examines US and NATO approaches to the management of escalation in asymmetric conflicts, and proposes innovative tools for managing crises in the future.

Download or read book School Meals Educational Achievement and School Competition written by Christel Vermeersch and published by World Bank Publications. This book was released on 2005 with total page 52 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book Household Finance written by Sumit Agarwal and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2020-10-07 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Household finance studies is a relatively recent field, exploring a growing understanding of how households make financial decisions relating to the functions of consumption, payment, risk management, borrowing and investing; how institutions provide goods and services to satisfy these financial functions of households; and how interventions by firms, governments and other parties affect the provision of financial services. This timely book analyses existing findings about household behavior as well as findings related to policy interventions. With international case studies, this book reviews a topic of global importance and brings a crucial up-to-date survey of the field for researchers and postgraduate students.

Download or read book Development Challenges of Pakistan written by Jamil Nasir and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on with total page 624 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Poor Economics written by Abhijit V. Banerjee and published by PublicAffairs. This book was released on 2012-03-27 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book Economic Growth written by Quamrul H. Ashraf and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2024-10-30 with total page 698 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why are some countries rich and others poor? This leading text introduces students to the latest theoretical tools, data, and insights underlying this pivotal question. By showing how empirical evidence relates to new and old theoretical ideas, Economic Growth provides students with a complete introduction to the discipline and the latest research. In addition to thorough updates to the data throughout the book, this fourth edition responds to new research in the field since the last edition. Major changes include: new material on labor’s share of income updated material on health and education updated material on the impact of trade on productivity a heavily revised chapter on government, including an expanded section on legacy effects of colonialism a heavily revised chapter on income inequality, including an expanded section on mobility a heavily revised chapter on culture, including an expanded section on persistent effects of geographical factors updated material on climate change, including an expanded discussion of outcomes and policies related to global warming updated online learning resources With its comprehensive and flexible organization, Economic Growth is ideal for a wide array of courses, including undergraduate and graduate courses in economic growth, economic development, macroeconomic theory, applied econometrics, and development studies.

Download or read book Why Doesn t Microfinance Work written by Milford Bateman and published by Zed Books Ltd.. This book was released on 2010-06-10 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.