From the Poor Economics website:
Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty
“For more than fifteen years Abhijit V. Banerjee and Esther Duflo have worked with the poor in dozens of countries spanning five continents, trying to understand the specific problems that come with poverty and to find proven solutions. Their book is radical in its rethinking of the economics of poverty, but also entirely practical in the suggestions it offers. Through a careful analysis of a very rich body of evidence, including the hundreds of randomized control trials that Banerjee and Duflo’s lab has pioneered, they show why the poor, despite having the same desires and abilities as anyone else, end up with entirely different lives.
Through their work, Banerjee and Duflo look at some of the most surprising facets of poverty: why the poor need to borrow in order to save, why they miss out on free life-saving immunizations but pay for drugs that they do not need, why they start many businesses but do not grow any of them, and many other puzzling facts about living with less than 99 cents per day.
POOR ECONOMICS argues that so much of anti-poverty policy has failed over the years because of an inadequate understanding of poverty. The battle against poverty can be won, but it will take patience, careful thinking and a willingness to learn from evidence. Banerjee and Duflo are practical visionaries whose meticulous workoffers transformative potential for poor people anywhere, and is a vital guide to policy makers, philanthropists, activists and anyone else who cares about building a world without poverty.”
I bought this book on a whim on one of my recent book binges. I hadn’t heard anything about this book prior to buying it, but was pleasantly surprised (and excited) when I found the book’s excellent website, among some great economics and development bloggers I follow who recommend the book. It is even used as required reading in many university-level development courses.
The book was also recently awarded the Best Business Book of the Year prize by the Financial Times (FT) and Goldman Sachs.
I have high expectations for the book after reading about it and I highly recommend you pick up a copy for your own economics/development collection. Those who recommend it say it is not heavy reading, so go buy it and dive in!
Disclaimer: I linked to Amazon.com for those money-conscious readers buying the book online, but I highly recommend supporting your local brick-and-mortar bookseller by buying it there instead.
The ‘higher education bubble’ at last has its own Wikipedia entry:
“The higher education bubble is a speculative boom and bust phenomenon in the field of higher education. According to the theory, while college tuition payments are rising, the rate of return of a college degree is decreasing, and the soundness of the student loan industry may be threatened by increasing default rates. College students who fail to find employment at the level needed to pay back their loans in a reasonable amount of time have been compared to the debtors under sub-prime mortgages whose home are worth less than what is owed to the bank.”
I think it is safe to say that the higher education revolution is underway. Actually, when student loan debt passed credit card debt, we should have smelled a rat.
All I can say is, it’s about time. As I approach the end of my time in graduate school I have compiled quite a collection of thoughts on higher education. Definitely not all bad, but a revolution is long overdue.
“‘Get one egg if you hand over 20 foam boxes. Get 2kg of uncooked rice if you come with 20 plastic bottles,’ Rangsan Pinthong said on Sunday in his capacity as the chief of the PCD’s Hazardous Waste Disposal Centre.The scheme has attracted an enthusiastic response. A big crowd was seen waiting to turn garbage into food at a PCD booth in Don Muang on Sunday.”
That is from a recent ‘food for garbage’ incentive scheme launched in Bangkok.
Incentive scheme’s interest me to no end. I started studying conditional cash transfer programs focusing on education in Bangladesh, then moved on to food-based incentive programs, and finally to asset transfer programs benefiting ultra-poor women. All very interesting. We need more focus on using incentives like these, especially for educational and environmental issues.
“In a couple of recent posts (here and here), Paul Krugman claims that it is just wrong to think that increasing income inequality is largely about education, because much of the income gains have accrued to the very top of the income distribution–the much discussed 1 percent. Instead, he says, increasing inequality is about the growing influence of oligarchs.”
That is from an engaging blog post by Greg Mankiw, a professor of economics at Harvard University.
And this:
“But it may be better to think of the return to education as stochastic. Education not only increases the average income a person will earn, but it also changes the entire distribution of possible life outcomes. It does not guarantee that a person will end up in the top 1 percent, but it increases the likelihood. I have not seen any data on this, but I am willing to bet that the top 1 percent are more educated than the average American; while their education did not ensure their economic success, it played a role.”
I’m with Mankiw on this one, especially, that “education not only increases the average income a person will earn, but it also changes the entire distribution of possible life outcomes.” I agree. Education in my mind is a lot about increasing opportunity. The only caveat I would add is that the economic value of education is a variable determined by many external factors. A extra year or two of education, particularly at the primary and secondary levels, is worth an enormous amount in a developing country.
I could go on and on about the value of promoting primary and secondary education, but I’ll stop here. Refer to the World Bank Education For All page for more reading.
Improving access to financial services:
- Mobile payment system
- Micro-insurance system
- Micro-lending platform
Provision of agricultural information:
- Mobile information platform
- Farmer helpline
Improving data visibility for supply chain efficiency:
- Smart logistics
- Traceability and tracking system
- Mobile management of supplier networks
- Mobile management of distribution networks
Enhancing access to markets:
- Agricultural trading platform
- Agricultural tendering platform
- Agricultural bartering platform
via @IAALD
Those are 12 agricultural opportunities in utilizing mobile technology as highlighted by a recent report by Vodafone. The rewards? A potential $138 billion addition to developing world farmers’ incomes by 2020.
My particular interest is in the mobile information platform as well as the microfinance portion of the report: micro-insurance, micro-lending, and mobile banking systems. Along with those systems a tremendous need will arise for financial literacy and technology training. It is a great opportunity for educators and technologists across the world.
I have three questions:
- Will technology incubators (hint: @iHub) around the world heed the call to produce these technologies?
- What role will educators play in the need for financial literacy training outside of formal schooling?
- Given that women do the majority of the farming around the world, what effects will this technology have on their abilities to become more economically independent?
“Developing countries spend hundreds of billions of dollars each year on schools, educational materials and teachers, but relatively little is known about how effective these expenditures are at increasing students’ years of completed schooling and, more importantly, the skills that they learn while in school. This paper examines studies published between 1990 and 2010, in both the education literature and the economics literature, to investigate which specific school and teacher characteristics, if any, appear to have strong positive impacts on learning and time in school. Starting with over 9,000 studies, 79 are selected as being of sufficient quality.”
That is from the abstract of a working paper titled, “School Resources and Educational Outcomes in Developing Countries: A Review of the Literature from 1990 to 2010.” I haven’t finished reading the paper yet, but so far it is very interesting and quite comprehensive. Highly recommended if you work in education in developing countries.
“The government of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) has agreed to launch the country’s first scientific journal, which they expect to attain international standards and become a reference point within central Africa.” via @SciDevNet
I am a strong advocate for investment in research and development in developing countries. Professional journals are a part of that ecosystem of brilliant thinking and discussion. At least they should be. Africa needs this badly if it is going to be a hub and incubator of scientific knowledge, particularly with its vast resources of indigenous knowledge.
No word yet on how open/closed this journal will be, however. My hopes are that it is open access all the way. Time will tell.
I was accepted a couple months back to present recent research at this year’s African Studies Association in Washington, D.C. However, I had to decline due to my research not being finished thanks to a jam-packed Fall 2011 semester.
Things have done a 180°.
The chair of my session has asked me to reconsider and I have obliged. Being embarrassed that my research is not complete, I didn’t want to pass up on this great opportunity. Eleven years ago I attended that same conference in D.C. where the theme focused on the use of technology in Africa.
This year the theme is “50 Years of African Liberation.” I will be discussing my paper on the historical context of gender disparity in education in Nigeria and how colonialism affected not only economic development policy, but also education policy. Should be interesting.
“…it is critical to recognize that one of the most common meanings or objectives assigned to the term (women’s “empowerment”) is women’s growth in capacity to make choices…it is important to bear in mind that access to material resources per se, or even the means by which women are better able to secure material resources (such as education and vocational training) are unlikely to have a significant impact on women’s empowerment without changes in other social, cultural, and legal structures of gender inequality, both within and beyond the domestic domain.” -Sylvia Chant in “Contributions of a Gender Perspective to the Analysis of Poverty”
I recently met up with a group of environmental migrant women who have been with BRAC for about twenty years after being displaced from their homes due to riverbank erosion. One of them had started working in a printing press making flyers, which is the way local candidates promote themselves before the elections – by stringing the flyers up like laundry on a clothesline. She realized that it was a pretty simple yet profitable business and decided to start her own printing press a few years later. After telling me this, her daughter arrived and I was dumbfounded: twice the size of the thirteen-year-olds I had grown accustomed to seeing in Bangladesh 25 years ago when I lived there, she was in school with the dream of one day becoming a doctor. This is what happens when children eat enough nutritious food every day. I see those changes everywhere: wealth in village communities, larger homes with sanitary latrine labs, three meals a day, and husbands that are involved in the lives of their wives and daughters.
That is from a recent interview with president and CEO of BRAC USA, Susan Davis. Both this woman and organization are very inspiring to those like myself interested in how microfinance can help alleviate poverty and build opportunities for millions of people across the globe.
