Understanding Poverty

by Abhijit V. Banerjee (Editor), Roland Benabou (Editor), Dilip Mookherjee (Editor)

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 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 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 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.

Genres: Economics, Nonfiction, Academic, Sociology, Poverty

496 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2006

About the author

Abhijit Vinayak Banerjee is an Indian economist. He is currently the Ford Foundation International Professor of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Banerjee is a co-founder of the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (along with economists Esther Duflo and Sendhil Mullainathan) and a Research Affiliate of Innovations for Poverty Action, a New Haven, Connecticut based research outfit dedicated to creating and evaluating solutions to social and international development problems, and a Member of the Consortium on Financial Systems and Poverty. He was awarded 2019 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his experimental approach to alleviating global poverty. He is also the recipient of the inaugural Infosys Prize in the category of Social Sciences (Economics).

Reviews

[tarun shukla · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great essays compilations on reasons of poverty. If you are in public policy or want to understand development process , this is a great book to begin with.

[Tobi ﾄﾋﾞ · Rating 3 out of 5]

Written by multiple contributors, it’s clear that some sections are better than others, presenting more compelling insights and analyses. The book's ambition to tackle such a complex issue as poverty via varied perspectives is commendable, yet it encounters challenges in maintaining consistency across chapters and at parts seems disconnected to a point where I’m not entirely sure what the purpose or the goal of this book really was.

While it may not secure a top rating due to disparities in the quality of content, this book manages to deliver valuable insights into understanding poverty from diverse viewpoints. Some segments demonstrate depth, offering nuanced perspectives, while others fall short in their ability to captivate or thoroughly examine their ideas.