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Understanding Poverty 1st Edition

4.0 4.0 out of 5 stars 19 ratings
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Understanding poverty and what to do about it, is perhaps the central concern of all of economics. Yet the lay public almost never gets to hear what leading professional economists have to say about it. This volume brings together twenty-eight essays by some of the world leaders in the field, who were invited to tell the lay reader about the most important things they have learnt from their research that relate to poverty. The essays cover a wide array of topics: the first essay is about how poverty gets measured. The next section is about the causes of poverty and its persistence, and the ideas range from the impact of colonialism and globalization to the problems of "excessive" population growth, corruption and ethnic conflict. The next section is about policy: how should we fight poverty? The essays discuss how to get drug companies to produce more vaccines for the diseases of the poor, what we should and should not expect from micro-credit, what we should do about child labor, how to design welfare policies that work better and a host of other topics. The final section is about where the puzzles lie: what are the most important anomalies, the big gaps in the way economists think about poverty? The essays talk about the puzzling reluctance of Kenyan farmers to fertilizers, the enduring power of social relationships in economic transactions in developing countries and the need to understand where aspirations come from, and much else. Every essay is written with the aim of presenting the latest and the most sophisticated in economics without any recourse to jargon or technical language.
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  1. ISBN-10
    0195305205
  2. ISBN-13
    978-0195305203
  3. Edition
    1st
  4. Publisher
    Oxford University Press
  5. Publication date
    April 20, 2006
  6. Language
    English
  7. Dimensions
    9.22 x 1.24 x 6.16 inches
  8. Print length
    496 pages
  9. See all details
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Editorial Reviews

Review

"A serious examination of where we stand and what we need to do."--Nicholas Kristof, The New York Review of Books

"Mass poverty is mankind's oldest, yet still most pressing, problem. Understanding Poverty describes the attack that economists are making to understand it on many different fronts. Every reader of the essays in this superb volume will appreciate the currrent excitement of development economics and the enormous progress it has made in the last two decades."--George Akerlof, Nobel Laureate in Economics, 2001

Book Description

This is a unique collection of essays by active research economists at top universities who would otherwise only write for an academic audience

Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Oxford University Press; 1st edition (April 20, 2006)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Paperback ‏ : ‎ 496 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0195305205
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0195305203
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.55 pounds
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 9.22 x 1.24 x 6.16 inches
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.0 4.0 out of 5 stars 19 ratings

Customer reviews

4 out of 5 stars
4 out of 5
19 global ratings

Top reviews from the United States

247collegetextbooks
5.0 out of 5 stars Review for Book
Reviewed in the United States on December 15, 2010
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The book is well written. Also, it is written so even if you don't know much Economic jargon you can follow it closely. Many viewpoints and ideas for solving the problem are suggested and key essays that have direct relevance today are used to support viewpoints.

Moreover, suggestions for the how much and what type of assistance should be given to eventually eradicate the prevalence of this problem is explained in much detail.
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Oliver Schmidt
4.0 out of 5 stars A seminal collection of papers on development economics
Reviewed in the United States on December 24, 2012
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Combines thorough literature review with comprehensive discussion of all aspects of poverty. A 'prelude' of Banerjee/Duflo's 'Poor economics' which syntesises some of this into an empirically grounded theory of poverty. Must-read for development economists and practitioners.
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L. White
4.0 out of 5 stars Solid read
Reviewed in the United States on February 4, 2013
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Good book. Solid read for a course. Sadly spilled water on it the day after it came so now the pages are puckered.
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M. Bludd
4.0 out of 5 stars Four Stars
Reviewed in the United States on June 29, 2015
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Used it for school and i got an A
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Iman Nasseri
5.0 out of 5 stars A good purchase
Reviewed in the United States on February 14, 2010
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I am happy of my purchase. It was so fast and the book is in the best situation. Thanks to Amazon
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Amazon Customer
5.0 out of 5 stars Five Stars
Reviewed in the United States on September 8, 2016
Verified Purchase
Excellent
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Masaaki Komatsu
4.0 out of 5 stars Four Stars
Reviewed in the United States on September 30, 2014
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The condition the book was within the expected.
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Arne123
4.0 out of 5 stars What poverty is all about and what can be done to make it history
Reviewed in the United States on February 10, 2012
Mass poverty is certainly one of the world's most pressing problems: An estimated 1 billion people are trying to subsist on less a dollar a day, another 1.8 billion live on less than two dollars a day. Being poor means not just to be cold and hungry, the poor are also frequently malnourished, illiterate, prone to sickness, crime, unemployment, and depression. Against this background, the three editors of this book, economists at MIT, Princeton and Boston University, have put together a superb collection of 28 essays, written by many of the subject's big shots, which deal with the most pertinent problems related to global poverty. Consequently, the articles cover a wide range of issues: the measurement of poverty, health, education, child labour, reproductive choices, corruption, micro-credit and -insurance, the roles of agriculture and trade, colonial heritages, and much more. Non-economists will welcome that most articles come to the point right in the first sentence and are written in nontechnical, easy-to-read language. But even those already familiar with the big questions of development economics will gain by reading about recent findings in this field. In addition, many contributions have an implicit message for policy makers that shows them how to go about fighting poverty - Kaushik Basu's article on child labour, for example, demonstrates that fining employers for hiring children can actually backfire, resulting in more and not less child labour.

Shortcomings and weak points, there are a few. One of the most heated debates in development economics of the past years, triggered by Dambisa Moyo's  Dead Aid  and William Easterly's  The Elusive Quest for Growth , has been whether foreign aid is actually a useful tool to combat poverty. Regrettably, there is no essay in this volume on the pros and cons of development assistance in general; nor any discussion of which form (grants, credits) it should take. Moreover, an essay on governance issues in general, and in particular on the role of failed states, wars and armed conflict (as highlighted by Paul Collier's  The Bottom Billion ), could have been useful. Furthermore, some articles miss the target: The essay on Ethnic Diversity and Poverty Reduction, for example, demonstrates how a higher degree of ethnic diversity in a Kenyan district leads to less funding for community goods than in a comparable region in neighboring Tanzania, where ethnicity is of less importance. This is certainly a nice finding, but the link to poverty itself is weak; and, besides, Tanzania has a much higher poverty incidence than Kenya.

On the other hand, I found two articles to be outstanding, if not to say jewels. Esther Duflo's essay Poor but Rational tackles the question to which extent the usual concepts of efficiency and rationality can actually be applied to the poor. She underlines that poverty does not only change the set of options available to individuals (the poor are cut off from many opportunities, such as credit), but that being poor also affects the way people think and decide in many ways. Duflo provides a striking example that illustrates the importance of this issue: Over a number of years, Kenyan farmers in the province of Busia had learned about the effects of fertilizer on agricultural productivity, which in fact had more than trebled harvests. Fertilizer, even in low quantities, was available at affordable prices, as was the possibility to buy it on credit. Still, only a very small and even declining fraction of farmers decided to actually use it - obviously farmers did not behave efficiently. What is needed according to Duflo is a theory of how poverty influences decision-making not only by affecting the constraints, but also by changing the decision-making process itself.

In another highly interesting article on the fundamental causes of poverty, Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson and James Robinson take up the institutions versus geography debate. Summarizing earlier and more technical articles, they show that it's definitely institutions that matter. If so many countries located in the tropics are poor today, this is a simple statistical association, not more. But wouldn't tropical diseases, for example, constitute a main obstacle to development? No! Mortality rates in India and West Africa due to tropical diseases were indeed high for European settlers, but not so much for locals due to genetic or acquired immunity. The authors show that in 1500 the globe's temperate areas were generally less prosperous than the tropical areas. What in fact happened around the equatorial belt is that colonizing powers tended to establish institutions that were extractive and elite-oriented. By contrast, settlement colonies would be endowed with institutions of private property, allowing the enforcement of rule of law and of property rights for a broad cross section of society while putting constraints on the actions of elites. The different institutional set-up rather than their geographical location would lead to a slow, but constant relative decline of tropical countries, the "reversal of fortune".

I recommend this book to all those who work in the aid industry (an estimated 500,000 people worldwide), to students who look for additional readings to complement their textbooks, and to all those who would like to have a non-technical overview of the vast field of development economics.
7 people found this helpful
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Top reviews from other countries

Char_Liberte
5.0 out of 5 stars 貧困との格闘
Reviewed in Japan on May 4, 2008
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一部で貧困の起源や要因、二部で税,児童労働禁止,マイクロクレジット,知財法など貧困削減政策、最後に貧困の新しい視点を示す。

1超豪華執筆陣
[編者]
Abhijit Banerjee:グローバリゼーションでの政府の役割
Roland Benabou:巻頭
Dilip Mookherjee:効率と衡平(適切な資産の不足は社会の一部の切り捨てに繋がり損失)
[寄稿者]
Daron Acemoglu:低開発国の歴史的起源
Jean-Jacques Laffont:深刻な贈収賄
Jean Tirole:知的財産(薬価)
Kaushik Basu:児童労働
Timothy Besley:失敗する政府での公共財の供給量
Debraj Ray:やる気と現実との乖離(貧者は機会があっても掴まない)
[他の一流寄稿者]
A.Deaton,S.Johnson&J.Robinson(with Acemoglu),S.Engerman&K.Sokoloff,T.Piketty,Aghion夫妻,P.Bardhan,M.Eswaran&A.Kotwal,P.Schultz,E.Miguel,E.Saez,M.Ravallion,C.Udry,A.Case,M.Ghatak(with Besley),M.Kremer,J.Morduch,R.Townsend,E.Duflo,S.Mullainathan,K.Munshi,G.Lury

2対象読者
非経済学者向けで数式は一切ない。

3ミクロな視点
家計,会社,共同体,市場が焦点で制度や政府の経済への影響も考察。金融政策,為替レートは扱わない。

4新しい視点
標準的な処方箋(自由市場,所有権)を離れ、社会学や心理学を借用。

5実証志向
事実の記述を重視。

優れた理論家・実証家が平易な言葉でポイントを教えてくれる。開発経済学の魅力を伝える入門書として最適だ。
5 people found this helpful
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