The Economics of Poverty Traps
The Economics of Poverty Traps

Author: Christopher B. Barrett

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2018-12-07

Total Pages: 425

ISBN-13: 022657430X

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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
Poverty Traps

Author: Samuel Bowles

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2016-05-31

Total Pages: 251

ISBN-13: 0691170932

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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.

How China Escaped the Poverty Trap
How China Escaped the Poverty Trap

Author: Yuen Yuen Ang

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2016-09-06

Total Pages: 345

ISBN-13: 1501706403

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WINNER OF THE 2017 PETER KATZENSTEIN BOOK PRIZE "BEST OF BOOKS IN 2017" BY FOREIGN AFFAIRS WINNER OF THE 2018 VIVIAN ZELIZER PRIZE BEST BOOK AWARD IN ECONOMIC SOCIOLOGY "How China Escaped the Poverty Trap truly offers game-changing ideas for the analysis and implementation of socio-economic development and should have a major impact across many social sciences." ― Zelizer Best Book in Economic Sociology Prize Committee Acclaimed as "game changing" and "field shifting," How China Escaped the Poverty Trap advances a new paradigm in the political economy of development and sheds new light on China's rise. How can poor and weak societies escape poverty traps? Political economists have traditionally offered three answers: "stimulate growth first," "build good institutions first," or "some fortunate nations inherited good institutions that led to growth." Yuen Yuen Ang rejects all three schools of thought and their underlying assumptions: linear causation, a mechanistic worldview, and historical determinism. Instead, she launches a new paradigm grounded in complex adaptive systems, which embraces the reality of interdependence and humanity's capacity to innovate. Combining this original lens with more than 400 interviews with Chinese bureaucrats and entrepreneurs, Ang systematically reenacts the complex process that turned China from a communist backwater into a global juggernaut in just 35 years. Contrary to popular misconceptions, she shows that what drove China's great transformation was not centralized authoritarian control, but "directed improvisation"—top-down directions from Beijing paired with bottom-up improvisation among local officials. Her analysis reveals two broad lessons on development. First, transformative change requires an adaptive governing system that empowers ground-level actors to create new solutions for evolving problems. Second, the first step out of the poverty trap is to "use what you have"—harnessing existing resources to kick-start new markets, even if that means defying first-world norms. Bold and meticulously researched, How China Escaped the Poverty Trap opens up a whole new avenue of thinking for scholars, practitioners, and anyone seeking to build adaptive systems.

Poor Economics
Poor Economics

Author: Abhijit V. Banerjee

Publisher: PublicAffairs

Published: 2012-03-27

Total Pages: 321

ISBN-13: 1610391608

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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.

The Economics of Crime
The Economics of Crime

Author: Rafael Di Tella

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2010

Total Pages: 486

ISBN-13: 0226791858

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This title presents a survey of the crime problem in Latin America, which takes a very broad and appropriately reductionist approach to analyse the determinants of the high crime levels, focusing on the negative social conditions in the region, including inequality and poverty, and poor policy design, such as relatively low police presence. The chapters illustrate three channels through which crime might generate poverty, that is, by reducing investment, by introducing assets losses, and by reducing the value of assets remaining in the control of households.

The Economics of Poverty
The Economics of Poverty

Author: Martin Ravallion

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2016

Total Pages: 737

ISBN-13: 0190212772

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"An overview of the economic development of and policies intended to combat poverty around the world"--Provided by publisher.

The Bottom Billion
The Bottom Billion

Author: Paul Collier

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 2008-10-02

Total Pages: 225

ISBN-13: 0195374630

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The Bottom Billion is an elegant and impassioned synthesis from one of the world's leading experts on Africa and poverty. It was hailed as "the best non-fiction book so far this year" by Nicholas Kristoff of The New York Times.

The Aid Trap
The Aid Trap

Author: R. Glenn Hubbard

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2009-08-31

Total Pages: 217

ISBN-13: 0231519508

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Over the past twenty years more citizens in China and India have raised themselves out of poverty than anywhere else at any time in history. They accomplished this through the local business sector the leading source of prosperity for all rich countries. In most of Africa and other poor regions the business sector is weak, but foreign aid continues to fund government and NGOs. Switching aid to the local business sector in order to cultivate a middle class is the oldest, surest, and only way to eliminate poverty in poor countries. A bold fusion of ethics and smart business, The Aid Trap shows how the same energy, goodwill, and money that we devote to charity can help local business thrive. R. Glenn Hubbard and William Duggan, two leading scholars in business and finance, demonstrate that by diverting a major share of charitable aid into the local business sector of poor countries, citizens can take the lead in the growth of their own economies. Although the aid system supports noble goals, a local well-digging company cannot compete with a foreign charity that digs wells for free. By investing in that local company a sustainable system of development can take root.

Evolutionary Games and Poverty Traps
Evolutionary Games and Poverty Traps

Author: Edgar J. Sánchez Carrera

Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Published: 2015-11-25

Total Pages: 144

ISBN-13: 1443886343

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This book explores how persistent states of underdevelopment can arise in strategic environments in which players are imitative rather than fully rational. Standard growth theory teaches that poverty traps are stable, low-level balanced growth paths to which economies gravitate due to adverse initial conditions or poor equilibrium selection. In other words, societies fail to take off into sustained growth because they started out as poor, with, for example, low longevity or poor human capital, or because they cannot invent institutions that successfully coordinate their investments. Evolutionary Games and Poverty Traps explains this pernicious form of coordination failure as a game between economic agents, such as, for example, firms investing in research and development and workers investing in human capital. Rates of return on research and development depend on average human capital, and rates of return on human capital depend on aggregate research and development spending. The outcome is a self-confirming equilibrium in evolutionary stable strategies in which unsuccessful players imitate successful ones. This equilibrium is particularly interesting in that in poor economies with a large fraction of low-human-capital workers or low research and development firms, imitative strategies do not support a take-off into sustained growth. To achieve such a take-off, society should subsidize the cost of education or research and development until the economy builds a critical mass of human capital or research and development.

Ending Global Poverty
Ending Global Poverty

Author: Stephen C. Smith

Publisher: St. Martin's Press

Published: 2015-03-17

Total Pages: 351

ISBN-13: 1466892323

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Over 800 million people suffer from chronic hunger, and over ten million children die each year from preventable causes. These may seem like overwhelming statistics, but as Stephen Smith shows in this call to arms, global poverty is something that we can and should solve within our lifetimes. Ending Global Poverty explores the various traps that keep people mired in poverty, traps like poor nutrition, illiteracy, lack of access to health care, and others and presents eight keys to escaping these traps. Smith gives readers the tools they need to help people overcome poverty and to determine what approaches are most effective in fighting it. For example, celebrities in commercials who encourage viewers to "adopt" a poor child really seem to care, but will sending money to these organizations do the most good? Smith explains how to make an informed decision. Grass-roots programs and organizations are helping people gain the capabilities they need to escape from poverty and this book highlights many of the most promising of these strategies in some of the poorest countries in the world, explaining what they do and what makes them effective.