How and When Is Poverty Transmitted from One Generation to the Next?

Last updated on August 10, 2012

That’s the theme of a special issue of the Development Policy Review, published last month. The special issue contains papers on:

1. Widowhood and asset inheritance in Sub-Saharan Africa, by Amber Peterman,
2. How inheritance is a gendered and intergenerational dimension of poverty, by Elizabeth Cooper and Kate Bird,
3. Inheritance practices and gender differences affect poverty and well-being in Ethiopia, by Neha Kumar and Agnes Quisumbing,
4. Women, marriage, and asset inheritance in Uganda, by Cheryl Doss et al.,
5. Intergenerational poverty traps in India, by my Sanford School colleague Anirudh Krishna, and
6. Women and inheritance in Sub-Saharan Africa, by Elizabeth Cooper.

This is a very important topic considering that up until recently, we did not have good datasets tracking people over time. We had even fewer datasets tracking people and their children over time.