Iqtisad al-fuqara' (Poor Economics)

by Duflo, Esther; Banerjee, Abhijit; Al Shamy, Anwar Al

• ISBN13: 9789992195246
• ISBN10: 999219524X
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2016-06-30
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Qatar Foundation Publishing

Summary

Billions of government dollars and thousands of charitable organizations and NGOs are dedicated to helping the world's poor. But much of the work they do is based on assumptions that are untested generalizations at best, flat out harmful misperceptions at worst.
Banerjee and Duflo have pioneered the use of randomized control trials in development economics. Work based on these principles, supervised by the Poverty Action Lab at MIT, is being carried out in dozens of countries. Drawing on this and their 15 years of research from Chile to India, Kenya to Indonesia, they have identified wholly new aspects of the behaviour of poor people, their needs, and the way that aid or financial investment can affect their lives. Their work transforms certain presumptions: that microfinance is a cure-all, that schooling equals learning, that poverty at the level of 99 cents a day is just a more extreme version of the experience any of us have when our income falls uncomfortably low.
Throughout, the authors emphasize that life for the poor is simply not like life for everyone else: it is a much more perilous adventure, denied many of the cushions and advantages that are routinely provided to the more affluent: if they do not have a piped water supply the poor cannot benefit from chlorination; if they cannot afford ready-made breakfast cereals they cannot gain the enriched vitamins and other nutrients; they are routinely denied access to markets; and, they get negative interest rates on their savings, while exorbitant rates are charged on their loans. The daily stress of poverty discourages long-term thinking and often leads to bad decision-making. Add to that the fact the poor are routinely denied the information that might help them manage the nightmarish predicament that in most cases they are born into through no fault of their own.

Author Biography

Abhijit Vinayak Banerjee was educated at the University of Calcutta, Jawaharlal Nehru University, and Harvard University. He is currently the Ford Foundation International Professor of Economics at MIT. Banerjee is a past president of the Bureau for Research in the Economic Analysis of Development, a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Econometric Society, and has been a Guggenheim Fellow and an Alfred P. Sloan Fellow. He is the recipient of many awards, including the inaugural Infosys Prize in 2009, and has been an honorary advisor to many organizations including the World Bank and the Government of India. Together with Esther Duflo and Sendhil Mullainathan of Harvard University, he founded the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab in 2003.

Esther Duflo is Abdul Latif Jameel Professor of Poverty Alleviation and Development Economics in the Department of Economics at MIT. She was educated at the Ecole Normale Supérieure, in Paris, and at MIT. She has received numerous honors and prizes including a John Bates Clark Medal for the best American economist under 40 in 2010, a MacArthur "genius" Fellowship in 2009. She was recognized as one of the best eight young economists by The Economist magazine, one of the 100 most influential thinkers by Foreign Policy since the list exists, and one of the "forty under forty" most influential business leaders under forty by Fortune magazine in 2010. Together with Abhijit Banerjee and Sendhil Mullainathan of Harvard University, she founded the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab in 2003.