Many of the poor borrow, more save, and most of them demand insurance products or related substitutes. However, most of these financial products, especially those catering towards the need for consumption stabilization are only offered by the informal market. Microfinance Institutions (MFIs)...

Since the 1970s, group-lending programmes have been promoted in many developing countries. Based on a survey that was conducted in Madagascar during 1992, the author presents the major characteristics of the formation, structure and conduct of the group-based credit schemes, makes an econometric...

This paper1 describes Participatory Wealth Ranking’s (PWR) accuracy in predicting the poverty status of groups identified by socio-economic indicators. On the basis of a census in 8 villages located in three of the six divisions of Bangladesh, 1660 households were scored using the...

The Productive Safety Net Programme (PSNP) is Ethiopia's poverty reduction strategy that forms the most important pillar of the country's agricultural transformation into a more productive and competitive sector. However, the extent to which the PSNP is linked to agriculture is unclear. This...

This paper compares the standard economic welfare approach to poverty measurement to the empirical approaches proposed in the capability literature under the special focus of their suitability for operational poverty assessment, i.e. targeting and outreach evaluation. We question whether the...