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Category: Poverty

Published August 16, 2012

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

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.

Published December 14, 2011

Payday Loans and Microfinance

Consider the fuss that people now make about microcredit — small loans, often at interest rates well above 50 per cent a year that are said to help the very poorest families manage their finances and even become entrepreneurs. That’s a story that many people are happy to accept without examining the evidence, while at the same time condemning payday loans, which appear to be a similar product. Are you sure [that’s] not just reflecting a prejudice that credit-starved Bangladeshis are heroic would-be entrepreneurs while credit-starved westerners must be trailer trash?

That’s Tim Harford, in a post on whether payday lending is wrong.

Each fall, when I teach the students in my development seminar about credit rationing, I tell them “If you think credit rationing is a developing-country phenomenon, think again.” I then encourage them to drive up North Roxboro Street north of I-85 to see how the market responds to failures of the credit market in Durham.

Published November 4, 2011

Food Deserts: Health Impacts and a Short Reading List

From an article in this week’s issue of The Economist:

This part of Chicago’s South Side is in the heart of one of America’s many food deserts. These are notable not for the absence of food, but for the kind of food available. Though crisps, sweets and doughnuts are easy to come by, an apple is a rare commodity. Yet all the evidence shows that poor access to quality food results in a higher risk of obesity, diabetes and cancer — and more avoidable deaths.

Although cynics might argue that the market gives people the food they deserve, research published this month in the New England Journal of Medicine suggests otherwise. During the 1990s, when the American government paid for around 1,800 women to move out of public housing, the women who had moved showed a 20% lower rate of obesity and diabetes than those who had not. In other words, their improved environment (which many assume would include better shops) led to their better health.

Here is a link to the New England Journal of Medicine article by Ludwig et al., which relies on a randomized controlled trial. Here is the Wikipedia page discussing food deserts.

This article by Marcel Fafchamps and Ruth Vargas Hill lists many scholarly references on food deserts. In particular, I would check out those by Alcaly and Klevorick (1971), Caraher et al. (1998), Goodman (1968), Whelan et al. (2002), and Wrigley et al. (2002).